Quotes About Justice

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

it was the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it. (Introduction)

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.

The freezing in hell that comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and singe forever.

What's fair ain't necessarily right

When you get these jobs you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

You know as well as I do that people who die bad don't stay in the ground.

I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity. Otherwise we stand meekly behind Eris, hold Nemesis's cloak, and genuflect at the feet of Thanatos.

Personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice, is more than a barren life, it's a trivial one.

There are no innocent white people, because every one of them is a potential nigger-killer, if not an actual one.

Some whites made sacrifices for Negroes. Real sacrifices.' '...But they haven't been able to stop the killing either. They are outraged, but that doesn't stop it. They might even speak out, but that doesn't stop it either. They might even inconvenience themselves, but the killing goes on and on.

And all he could say was that he did not know. He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

Virginia law, in 1831, is instructive and representative.

Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice—to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation.

Other than outwitting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants of paradise to do.

If you do not feed the hungry, they will eat you, and the manner of their eating is as varied as it is FIERCE.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination. A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

What good is a man's life if he can't even choose what to die for?