Quotes About Justice

When you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking who --beg pardon, Lord-- who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms

Guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful weapon.

but politics between wars demands symmetry and a more elegant idea of justice, even to the point of masquerading, a bit decadently, as mercy. It is more complicated than mass execution, more difficult and less satisfying, but there are arrangements Tchitcherine can't see, wide as Europe, perhaps the world, that can't be disturbed very much, between wars...

We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by "society".

The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about "social justice" all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get reelected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.

Justice at all costs' is not justice.

The essence of bigotry is denying others the same rights you claim for yourself. Green bigots are a classic example.

The costs of achieving justice matter. Another way of saying the same thing is that "justice at all costs" is not justice. What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost—whether economic, psychic, or other—on an innocent person? And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice?

Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?

In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called "social justice" might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.

One of the most central—and most controversial—premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by "society.

There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on "evolving standards" rather than known rules.

The burgeoning of the American welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century and the declining effectiveness of the American criminal justice system at the same time allowed borrowed and counterproductive cultural traits to continue and flourish among those blacks who had not yet moved beyond that culture, thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous, and self-destructive subculture in many urban ghettos.

Among the precepts that Andrew Jackson's mother taught him were never to sue anybody for slander or for assault and battery: Always settle them cases yourself.

We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.

A third major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences in income, "representation" in desirable occupations or institutions, or otherwise disadvantaged.

A Yoruba governor, defeated through vote fraud, was later found by a court to have won in fact by a million votes.

The presumption of equal outcomes in the absence of malign actions can lead to incorrect— and disastrous— conclusions in other circumstances.

Perhaps an even more remarkable contribution of Britain to the growth of freedom in the world was its leading role in the destruction of the international slave trade, and then of slavery itself.

But don't you hear what I've said?' David cried. 'It's this very vengeance and betrayal that's torn our country apart. Where will it end? If we believe in God, we must believe in a divine justice that in time will restore sanity.' 'I have no time,' said Mireille. 'I will not wait for God.

The Bible is inherently political in that it routinely speaks against people who abuse their power in order to oppress other people.

Stopping at a red light, Chris picks up his Bible and turns to the Old Testament book of Amos. "Here, for instance, in chapter five, the prophet says, 'You, Israel, you were supposed to take care of the poor and you're not doing it,' " Chris says. " 'You're using power and wealth to tilt the system in your favor.