Quotes About Justice

But,' Gerald insisted, 'you don't allow one man to take away his neighbour's living, so why should you allow one nation to take away the living from another nation?' There was a long slow murmur from Hermione before she broke into speech, saying with a laconic indifference: 'It is not always a question of possessions, is it?

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.

Here lies the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way— He was right, dead right, as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he were wrong.

The Boston Transcript once printed this bit of significant doggerel:   Here lies the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way— He was right, dead right, as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he were wrong.   You

20,000 Years in Sing Sing

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.

We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid, and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!

What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?

its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;

Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked For White People Only.

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen!

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

Comrade, you and I can never be satisfied with sitting down before a great human problem and saying nothing can be done. We must do something. That is the reason we are here on Earth.

Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not Is he white? but Can he work? When men ask artists, not Are they black? but Do they know?

the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging.

We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.

The most obvious question which this study suggest is: How far in a State can a recognized moral wrong safely be compromised?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.

How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow s hall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure, -- is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?