Best 4420 quotes in «justice quotes» category

I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.

It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut

It all suddenly seemed like a hopeless fight, but so what? I told myself. What does it cost you to pretend that the can change (for the better)? That history is an arc and it bends toward justice, even if it is long?

It does not matter that the 'intentions' of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, 'intend' for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense - ignore the heat and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of 'personal responsibility' in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.

It doesn't matter if justice is on your side. You have to depict your position as just.

{The final resolutions at Robert Ingersoll's funeral, quoted here} Whereas, in the order of nature -- that nature which moves with unerring certainty in obedience to fixed laws -- Robert G. Ingersoll has gone to that repose which we call death. We, his old friends and fellow-citizens, who have shared his friendship in the past, hereby manifest the respect due his memory. At a time when everything impelled him to conceal his opinions or to withhold their expression, when the highest honors of the state were his if he would but avoid discussion of the questions that relate to futurity, he avowed his belief; he did not bow his knee to superstition nor countenance a creed which his intellect dissented. Casting aside all the things for which men most sigh -- political honor, the power to direct the futures of the state, riches and emoluments, the association of the worldly and the well- to-do -- he stood forth and expressed his honest doubts, and he welcomed the ostracism that came with it, as a crown of glory, no less than did the martyrs of old. Even this self-sacrifice has been accounted shame to him, saying that he was urged thereto by a desire for financial gain, when at the time he made his stand there was before him only the prospect of loss and the scorn of the public. We, therefore, who know what a struggle it was to cut loose from his old associations, and what it meant to him at that time, rejoice in his triumph and in the plaudits that came to him from thus boldly avowing his opinions, and we desire to record the fact that we feel that he was greater than a saint, greater than a mere hero -- he was a thoroughly honest man. He was a believer, not in the narrow creed of a past barbarous age, but a true believer in all that men ought to hold sacred, the sanctity of the home, the purity of friendship, and the honesty of the individual. He was not afraid to advocate the fact that eternal truth was eternal justice; he was not afraid of the truth, nor to avow that he owed allegiance to it first of all, and he was willing to suffer shame and condemnation for its sake. The laws of the universe were his bible; to do good, his religion, and he was true to his creed. We therefore commend his life, for he was the apostle of the fireside, the evangel of justice and love and charity and happiness. We who knew him when he first began his struggle, his old neighbors and friends, rejoice at the testimony he has left us, and we commend his life and efforts as worthy of emulation.

It has been heart-warming, in the midst of all our sadness, to see a good mix of people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different religions or with no religion involved in demonstrations and urgent actions to support our calls for justice and peace. Those tireless supporters have tried to make a difference one act of kindness, one act of solidarity, one act of charity at a time. And they did so because they believe that all humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They believe in acting towards one another in a spirit of humanity because human rights are universal, and justice and peace are human rights.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man." J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962.

I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize …. Maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.

I therefore submit to you that what qualifies a person to be called a man according to God, is the ability of the individual to live by the right standard and values that heaven values. Standards like, justice, judgement, truth and equity.

I think I just said it, but I think it’s worth repeating. They gave me hope that there is good in the world out there. There really is. It really does exist. Regardless of how bad things can be, and how down on your luck you can be, or how bad your trust is broken when it comes to warming up to people and all that stuff, I know that there’s people out there that genuinely wanna help. Putting yourself in that position is a huge step, and it’s a very risky and fragile step, but it’s also a step that needs to be taken because there is help. And you can get through something like this. You really can. - Jim, from "To the Survivors

I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will they understand as justice.

It is a considerable point in all good legislation to determine exactly the credibility of witnesses and the proofs of a crime. Every reasonable man, everyone, that is, whose ideas have a certain interconnection and whose feelings accord with those of other men, may be a witness. The true measure of his credibility is nothing other than his interest in telling or not telling the truth; for this reason it is frivolous to insist that women are too weak [to be good witnesses], childish to insist that civil death in a condemned man has the same effects as a real death, and meaningless to insist on the infamy of the infamous, when they have no interest in lying.

It is about doing the most good with the only two hands I can control.

[I]t is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Zizek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis - the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those’ abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure - since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible… But this impasse - it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic - is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals - but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-asubject: Capital.

It is a world," he said, "filled with the mysterious joinder of accident!" "It is a world," replied Abner, "filled with the mysterious justice of God!

It is a smokescreen if someone believes that they can make change without identifying the root causes which influence social disorder.

It is entirely possible to work for justice without thirsting for blood.

It is essential that justice be done, it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different.

It is good to be always nice, but there is no problem in roughness if you are in justice.

It is increasingly difficult for social justice activists to advocate – with a clear conscience – for women, the poor, or immigrants while eating other animals or consuming the nursing milk of cattle. Animal activists are exposing the links that connect the oppression of nonhuman animals with human oppression.

It is increasingly difficult for social justice activists to advocate – with a clear conscience – for women, the poor, or immigrants while eating other animals or consuming the nursing milk of cattle. Animal activists have already begun to effectively expose the links of oppression across species.

It is in the face of this radical revisioning of ourselves as the community of Christ that our relationship to “the least of these” is formed. They don’t represent a threat to our lives, both physically (in their demands on our resources, in the loss of safety) and existentially (in how they expose our pretense, our privilege), but they actually can be seen as Christ Himself. Not in some romantic, shallow way in which we take in the homeless beggar only to have him later throw off his rags to reveal himself as Jesus, rewarding us for our righteousness. No, we encounter Christ in them because the process we have gone through has demonstrated to us that in the other—in those most different from us—our own inadequacy is exposed, offering us the opportunity to embrace the gift of the transforming cross.

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

It is never right to injure anyone. It can never be right to make someone worse than he is.

It is not enough to make good laws; they must be enforced. It is not enough to denounce bad laws; they must be changed. The better the laws the more righteous the judgments. The wiser the rulers are the more prosperous a nation.

It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering - it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at the secret self which smolders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquility of a man like me - sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am - but judge us not. In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice - the long luxury of your freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now.

It is not unpatriotic to acknowledge America’s faults. No country is perfect… We can’t reach the top of the mountain if we don’t fix the injustice and confront our lies.

It is, therefore, not cruelty, or a thirst for blood, or any other criminal tendency, that induces such a man to strike a blow at organized power. On the contrary, it is mostly because of a strong social instinct, because of an abundance of love and an overflow of sympathy with the pain and sorrow around us, a love which seeks refuge in the embrace of mankind, a love so strong that it shrinks before no consequence, a love so broad that it can never be wrapped up in one object, as long as thousands perish, a love so all-absorbing that it can neither calculate, reason, investigate, but only dare at all costs.

It is obvious to you that the struggle will be an unequal one, but I shall make it - I shall make it as long as I have an ounce of strength left in me, or any life left in me.

It is the people who are displeased with injustice that can be a channel for social justice.

It is only when we see the worst that Man can offer, that we begin to see the best that Man still holds. If they are blinded by greed, then it’s time to pick up our virtual stones so we can start knocking sense into ‘em...

It is unjust, but only Christlike, to suffer persecution for doing what is right.

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly. Americans are nostalgic for the village setting and hold dear the notion of community, so the idea that the oppressed do not band together in solidarity is counter to our myths. But community spawns communal justice; the village gives rise to the feud.

It may not be pretty, but sometimes justice has to be hard to keep the rest of us straight and safe.

It's a good thing I'm not the president, because I would prosecute everybody who was involved in that torture, I would prosecute the people who did it, I would prosecute the people who ordered it and they would all go to jail! Because Torture is against the law!

It’s called being in love. It’s more frightening than confronting your deepest fear and opens you to being hurt beyond the physical plane.” He placed a hand over his heart. “It might seem as though it’s a weakness to you but it is proof that we are more than numbers, experiments, or whatever else Mercile intended us to be. It takes bravery and strength to feel such strong emotions for one person when we were denied from birth the chance to ever care about anything or anyone. I’m not saying it’s easy or painless. It is probably one of the most complex things I’ve experienced. Jessie is my life. My heart beats for her and I will admit to all that I wouldn’t want to go on if I lost her. The unmated ones don’t understand and are currently looking confused or horrified. I’m hopeful they’ll know the ups and downs of falling in love one day. It’s a gift and a curse at times but everyone should experience it. It’s a part of life and we are survivors.

It's an insidious idea, this notion that there is life after death. The promise of a reward in the afterlife has been used as an excuse to deny help to the poor, helpless and oppressed; to explain away human misery rather than deal with it. It is an idea that is used to encourage young men and women to kill themselves, and others, so that they can become martyrs. It allows victims of injustice to be told not to worry because justice will be done in the afterlife. It depresses me to think that so many people on the planet live their lives with this notion. Can we truly fulfill our potential as a species as long as we hold on to, and encourage, the perpetuation of the lie of life after death?

It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting.

It wasn't because he had something to prove. Not to himself or his dads or...or even Nova. No, this wasn't about him. This wasn't about the Sentinel. This was about justice being served.

It's hard luck always having to be a judge.

It's important to remember that peace, liberty and freedom changes many aspects in our thoughts as far as life is concerned.

It's Unfair to be fair, For Life is unfair

It takes thousands of people to turn an illegal political order into a democratic injustice. And as it happens, a huge portion of those people are civil servants. So, if even a handful of civil servants stand strong, responsible and conscientious, then no politician has the power in his pea-brain to do injustice to the people.

It was the sort of anger that comes to a slow boil inside the hearts of good men who want justice, and finding it out oftheir grasp, decide vengeance is the next best thing.

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

It's not enough for the torch of liberty to be held up high only by one woman, every human must hold the torch up high in every corner of the world.