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Quotes about justice

171 quotes from 112 people

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Segregation is wrong because it is a system of adultery perpetuated by an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.
Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Cobo Center speech (1963)
- Race
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
Walter Lippmann1889–1974The Good Society (1937), Ch. XII: “The Political Principles of Liberalism”, §6, p. 267
- Freedom
- Government
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
William Hazlitt1778–1830Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1823), No. 19
- Envy
The law is simply and solely made for the exploitation of those who do not understand it or of those who, for naked need, cannot obey it.
Bertolt Brecht1898–1956The Threepenny Opera (1928), Act 3, scene 1 (Peachum)
- Laws
The peace we seek and need means much more than mere absence of war. It means the acceptance of law, and the fostering of justice, in all the world.
Dwight D. Eisenhower1890–1969Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Developments in Eastern Europe and the Middle East (October 31, 1956)
- War & Peace
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.”
Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
- Laws
Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.
Voltaire1694–1778“Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws”, Dictionnaire philosophique (1785-1789)
Justice, n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.
Ambrose Bierce1842–1914The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
- Government
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
George Bernard Shaw1856–1950Maxims for Revolutionists (1903), #62
- Animals
Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.
Che Guevara1928–1967Letter to his Children (1965)
Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Edmund Burke1729–1797Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted.
Benjamin Franklin1706–1790Letter to Benjamin Vaughan, on Blackstone’s Ratio (14 March 1785)
- Laws
It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
Edmund Burke1729–1797Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn1918–2008Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, “The Struggle Intensifies”
- Morality
No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice — when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.
Montesquieu1689–1755Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89
- Laws