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Quotes about justice

171 quotes from 112 people

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Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass1817–1895West India Emancipation (If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress) (1857)
- Freedom
- Power
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Jesus7 BC–AD 30The Sermon on the Mount
- Virtue
I believe that to have interfered as I have done⁠—as I have always freely admitted I have done⁠—in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.
John Brown1800–1859John Brown’s Last Speech (1859)
- Slavery
Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,⁠—I submit; so let it be done!
John Brown1800–1859John Brown’s Last Speech (1859)
- Life & Death
- Slavery
“Sentence first⁠—verdict afterwards.”
Lewis Carroll1832–1898Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Chapter XIIIn context
I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Chapter XXIVIn context
In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.
Charles Dickens1812–1870Great Expectations (1861), Chapter VIIIIn context
- Children
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter IIn context
- Life & Death
It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
William Faulkner1897–1962The Sound and the Fury (1929), April Eighth, 1928 (1 of 2)In context
It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly.
Jonathan Swift1667–1745Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter VIn context
- Laws
The longest way must have its close,⁠—the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.
Harriet Beecher Stowe1811–1896Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Volume II, Chapter XLIn context
- Hope
Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
Thomas Hardy1840–1928Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment, Chapter LIXIn context
- God
It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood.
William Shakespeare1564–1616Macbeth (c. 1606), Act III, Scene IV, spoken by MacbethIn context
- Good & Evil
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
William Shakespeare1564–1616Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), Act III, Scene I, spoken by PrinceIn context
- Forgiveness
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
William Shakespeare1564–1616King Lear (c. 1606), Act III, Scene IV, spoken by LearIn context
- Charity