Quotes About Justice

My sentence formally was imposed on my mothers 50th Birthday January 24th 1983. The jury recommended it July 1st 1982.

There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.

If you hear me out, I believe you'll discover that what motivates me more than any other issue is the defense of everyone's rights.

My faith motivates me to really try to work on behalf of and advocate for those who are least able to advocate for themselves.

Colin Kaepernick is one of the leaders in the movement for black lives. His role as an athlete and activist is not only motivating but inspiring.

the breakdown of law and order brought on by constantly stirred bitter resentments almost invariably leads to more suffering among the less fortunate.

Have we reached the ultimate state 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?

If we ever allow morality or law to become just a question of whose ox is gored, then we will have taken a fatal step toward national suicide. We can survive lapses into hypocrisy, but we cannot survive making hypocrisy a ruling principle.

When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy. It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money. War is our century's prostitution.

In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.

Our legal system does not grant adults a right to liberty, because they already possess that right; it only revokes the right to liberty (for certain offenses) or restores it (if the deprivation did not conform to due process).

The judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil.

Not until human nature itself progresses morally will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim.

Seeing the poor as one vast homogenous mass, we overlook that saving ten children from a painful death by hunger does make a real difference, all the difference for these children, and that this difference is quite significant even when many other children remain hungry.

He entombed himself in the flesh of a thousand fictional heroes, giving his favorites extension in life beyond their books, carrying their banners into the gray places of actuality, seeing himself now as the militant young clergyman, arrayed, in his war on slum conditions, against all the moneyed hostility of his fashionable church, aided in his hour of greatest travail by the lovely daughter of the millionaire tenement owner, and winning finally a victory for God, the poor, and himself.

But these cries proceeded not so much from a conviction of wounded justice and deceived innocence as from their opposites. It was the sublime, ironic, and irrevocable justice of what had happened to them, and their knowledge that they alone had been responsible for it, that maddened them. From this arose their sense of outrage and their cries of vengeance.

Le citoyen doit-il un seul instant, dans quelque mesure que ce soit, abandonner sa conscience au législateur ? (LA DÉSOBÉISSANCE CIVILE)

And yet, Lacedaemonians, you still delay, and fail to see that peace stays longest with those, who are not more careful to use their power justly than to show their determination not to submit to injustice. On the contrary, your ideal of fair dealing is based on the principle that, if you do not injure others, you need not risk your own fortunes in preventing others from injuring you.

You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

If you have the power to put a stop to subjugation, yet look the other way while it happens, then you have done it yourselves

when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel...

if one follows one's self-interest one wants to be safe, whereas the path of justice and honour involves one in danger.

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses.

You may be sure that we are as well aware as you of the difficulty of contending against your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. But we trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the Lacedaemonians, who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred. Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational.