Quotes About Justice

So there it was. My big lesson of the day, something I'd take with me and never forget. The whole legal system – if you think it's just a big set of rules, you're dead wrong. It's really a bunch of people sitting around and talking to each other, deciding what they want to do with you. When they make their decision, then they pull out whatever rule they need to make it happen.

Martin Luther King Jr. said something that I will always remember. He said, "A man can't ride your back unless it's bent." Don't bend over. Stay tall. Keep climbing.

When police officers put targets before people, rules before relationships, and revenue before community, they are not acting in the best interests of the people—whether they be black, Hispanic, Asian, or white.

If you think about it, Santa Claus is a little like Batman. He's a vigilante.

scientific whaling, and other lies will be exposed and become atrocities of the past.

Dr. Paul Farmer said it best: "The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world." Esther helped us see the truth in that statement.

I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.

In this country, a federal grand jury probe is the closest thing to Courts of Inquisition or a Star Chamber that exists. There are few rights, nothing that comes close to cross-examination, and no right to counsel inside the jury room. There are no real rules of evidence. The only thing they can't do is torture you, and on that you must take the government's word.

He wondered if American jails were better than those in Russia. He

The injury that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.

Always treat people with respect and kindness, for they may be selected to be on your jury.

Brittany Gomez, only six months old, was left blind and retarded after being brutally shaken by her baby-sitter, who drew only probation and ninety days in a halfway house after pleading to felony child abuse. Then Brittany died, the case was ruled a homicide, and murder charges were filed. The baby-sitter again pled guilty in exchange for no prison time. She killed a child and never spent a day behind bars.

Before he even arrived, he sent each top police official a framed, hand-embroidered motto: Police Unto Others As You Would Have Them Police Unto You. What did that mean? Don't arrest anybody because you wouldn't like to be arrested?

To a little girl I never met who caused so many to reflect within themselves; and to those cops and prosecutors across the country who do the right thing: day in, day out.

I've been hearing about how good and kind and merciful that old boy is upstairs, but I've read the Old Testament. You just take a look at all the folks that Jehovah decreed needed to burned or sacked and smited out of their homes. That old fellow is a psychopathic serial killer, you just check the facts.

IF THIS COUNTRY should ever reach the point," the president was saying, while I sat on the floor with that bowl of popcorn between my legs, "where any man or group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our courts and Constitution, no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.

Political philosophy is the study of the deepest, most intractable, and most enduring problems of political life.

Today it is the hope of many both here and abroad that we might some day overcome the basic structure of regime politics and organize our world around global norms of justice and international law. Is such a hope possible? It cannot be entirely ruled out, but such a world—a world administered by international courts of law, by judges and judicial tribunals—would no longer be a political world. Politics is only possible within the structure of the regime.

Law is a reflection of society, justice is a reflection of an idealization of that society.

Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.

He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things – once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

Self-righteous wrath had planted more corpses in the ground than an empire could lay claim to

The world, someone once said, gives back what is given. In abundance. But then, as Kallor would point out, someone was always saying something. Until he got fed up and had them executed.