Quotes About Social justice

This was, for me, the crucial lesson of middle school and one for the rest of life: that one can protest, fight, and win against injustice, but that those in power will just change the circumstance rather than concede the argument.

The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve.

It's time we stop worrying, and get angry you know? But not angry and pick up a gun, but angry and open our minds.

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not 'significant' to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

We recall Macaulay's warning that democracy would collapse when the poor used their electoral power to rob rich Peter to pay lazy Paul. Polybius expressed the same idea in 130 BC: When

Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Feed with cold and usurous hand? Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! And their sun does never shine, And their fields are bleak & bare, And their ways are fill'd with thorns; It is eternal winter there. For where-e'er the sun does shine, And where-e'er the rain does fall, Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall.

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.

Y son los buenos los que no pueden rechazar la cuenta cuando se la presentan. Por la sencilla razón de que les pueden obligar a pagarla

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

Maria Spiridonova

O king of Ayodhya, you know I'm innocent, and yet, unfairly, you're asking me to step into the fire. You offer me a tempting prize indeed—to live in happiness with you and my children. But I must refuse. Because if I do what you demand, society will use my action forever after to judge other women. Even when they aren't guilty, the burden of proving their innocence will fall on them. And society will say

As Christians who are called to love the least of these, we need to realize that poverty is not a problem, it is our problem. When we contemplate what is happening globally, we might likely agree that a large percentage of our income should be diverted immediately to care for those in greatest need. We could easily determine that 50 percent or more of our annual income should be given away.

You're blindly following a tradition that says because women didn't leave behind voluminous records of their thoughts and deeds, then they didn't have any thoughts and deeds - they were just standing on the sidelines while history was made by men. Just because a woman didn't have a vote doesn't mean that she didn't have an informed opinion. It doesn't mean she was incapable of thinking or acting.

Let us kill all the lawyers!

One great reason why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that [according to the common observation] one part of the world does not know what the other suffers. Many of them do not know, because they do not care to know: they keep out of the way of knowing it -and then plead their voluntary ignorance as an excuse for their hardness of heart.

La psychanalyse et la sociologie ne prennent pas en compte l'oppression des femmes. Ne la prenant pas en compte, elles la reprennent nécessairement à leur compte : elles l'intègrent comme un donné.

What social justice requires, King assumes, cannot be discerned in the abstract from the safe distance of a policy analyst or an academic theorist. It can only be found by looking at the actual, embodied suffering of the victims of oppression and injustice, and questioning the structural arrangements that perpetuate their suffering.

While we know it is possible to work for justice without being religious, we believe that religious faith presupposes a mandate to write, speak, and act for social justice.

The women's movement doesn't hate men. It hates patriarchy – a system created and supported by all of us, where men and women are legally, financially and socially unequal.

The mandate to practice social justice is unsettling because taking on the struggles of the poor invariably means challenging the wealthy and those who serve their interests.

She pointed out that to claim to be apolitical or neutral in the face of such injustices would be, in actuality, to uphold the status quo - a very political position to take and on the side of the oppressors.

Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. The beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to give the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of work should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is just that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of women.