Quotes About Justice

I am not going to answer to this so-called court, out of respect for the truth and the will of the Iraqi people. I've said what I've said, and I'm not guilty.

White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.

Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.

This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land

Then after that I asked this fella what rights he had that we were offendin', and he said, well, he didn't know, but he must have some rights he didn't know nothin' about.

W]e have a country here where the past cannot keep a good man in chains, and that's the nature of the war.

Titus Andronicus:

We are responsible for our behavior, not that of our group, nor that of our ancestors. The arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice, as King claimed, and we thus dishonor the sacrifices of our forebears when we suggest things are as bad or worse today than before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The only answer to terror is an excess of democracy.

the sad emptiness, upon slaying the villain who had brought madness upon his village, of learning that vengeance was not justice and that justice was to be had nowhere in the world;

Justice is relative to social meanings. A given society is just if its substantive life is lived in a certain way, in a way that is faithful to the shared understandings of the members.

It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.

No one should be subjected to force over things which belonged to him.

Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie. (There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

But we must not (as we do every day) give the name of duty to an inward bitter harshness born of self-interested passion, nor that of courage to malicious and treacherous dealings. What they call zeal is their propensity to wickedness and violence: it is not the cause which sets them ablaze but self-interest: they stoke up war not because it is just but because it is war.

Any instruction which convince people that religious belief alone, without morality, suffices to satisfy God's justice is destructive of all government and is far more harmful than is ingenious and subtle. Men's practices reveal an extraordinary distinction between devotion and sense of right and wrong.

De gangene jeg har merket at en kvinne har vært misfornøyd med meg, har jeg ikke straks gitt hennes lettsinn skylden, men har spurt meg selv om jeg ikke heller burde skylde på naturen. Sannelig har den gitt meg en behandling i strid med både strafferett og sivilrett - og krenket meg på det groveste.

Pain compels even the innocent to lie.

Why can't it be the factories that are smashed to the ground, the sweater's dens that are consumed with flames, rather than the opera houses and the fine homes? Why should people living on a higher plane be dragged down to a lower, rather than those on a lower rising to a higher?

Reinhold Niebuhr

there is no glory in punishing

self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.

it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime