Quotes About Justice

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind.

I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with—the dollar is innocent—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.

Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

La legge non renderà mai gli uomini liberi; sono gli uomini a dover mantenere libera la legge.

Il solo obbligo che ho il diritto di assumermi è di fare in ogni momento quello che penso sia giusto fare.

If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who put him there; but if he should steal ninety

Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?

La legge non ha mai reso gli uomini neppure poco più giusti; e anzi, a causa del rispetto della legge, perfino gli onesti sono quotidianamente trasformati in agenti d'ingiustizia.

so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconvenience, it is the will of God … that the established government be obeyed—and no longer. This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.

Ä°lkeli eylemler, hakk?n idraki ve icras?, ÅŸeyleri ve iliÅŸkileri deÄŸiÅŸtirir; bu da özünde devrimci bir davran??t?r ve yaln?zca geçmiÅŸte de devrimci olan ÅŸeylerden ibaret deÄŸildir. Devletleri ve kiliseleri bölmekle kalmaz, aileleri de böler; evet, içindeki ÅŸeytani yan? kutsal olandan ay?rarak bireyi de böler.

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them? Or shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we have succeeded? Or shall we transgress them at once? — 1849 Essay on Civil Disobedience.

I had now regained my liberty, said the stranger; but I had lost my reputation; for there is a wide difference between the case of a man who is barely acquitted of a crime in a court of justice, and of him who is acquitted in his own heart, and in the opinion of the people.

Time changes us all, and happy that change where justice, truth, and love which can know no change grow in beauty with the passing years.

To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed. They will champion the causes of life's underdogs, forging a society without class discrimination. They will supply humanity with music and beauty as it has never known. They will endure.

It was the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of some one else.

But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of sentiment.

And she really had tones to make justice weep.

Strether wondered, desiring justice. "They seem—all the women—very harmonious." "Oh in closer quarters they come out!" And then, while Strether was aware of fearing closer quarters, though giving himself again to the harmonies

I want to bring them down,—down, down, down! I want to turn the tables upon them—I want to mortify them as they mortified me. They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth! I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.

They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything.

She wondered why a prison should have such an evil face if it was erected in the interest of justice and order–an expression of the righteous forces of society.

grave inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sense--which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of--that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity.