Quotes About Justice

We don't need guns. We just have to be patient. And wait for your hearts to stop beating. And stop they will. And for some of you, real damned soon, truth be told.

It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.

That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live - lives.

If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.

In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.

Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.

Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.

We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history.

Religious belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived.

Men talk of the Negro problem," said Frederick Douglass in one of his last public speeches, in 1893. "There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.

The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened the 'sanctity of the home.

The black man that sympathized, worked and fought for this great country of ours during its threatened destruction is a thousand times better than the white man that sympathized, worked, plotted and fought against it

Indiana, where truth was no defense, and the First Amendment had no force of law.

But at the time, she was too scared to do anything. His reach into the cops and courts, he told her, was beyond anything she could imagine.

could not find a lawyer in Muncie brave enough to take on his defense of free speech.

Stephenson's crime went unpunished.

Steve offered to pay his victim a month's salary if she would write a statement saying he had not attacked her. She refused. But because she was engaged and worried about what her fiancé would think if she had to go through a trial with a man who would try to destroy her, she backed off. The case disappeared.

There were still men walking the streets of 1922 Indiana who had fought against the slaveholders, and who believed that liberating humans held as property had been the highest calling of their lives. Among them was William H. Stern, a white man raised on a farm north of Indianapolis.

STUDENTS ROUT KLANSMEN

feared going to the police. No one would believe her, as he warned her afterward. And even if they did, they wouldn't dare to go after him.

He told her he "controlled every court in Indiana." For $30, he could get someone to sign an affidavit to anything he dictated, he boasted. For $50, he could get a man killed.

At the time, she was too traumatized to go to the police and report a felony committed by one of the most powerful men in the state. And besides, what good would it do? The Kokomo cops were Klansmen.

After dangling in a summer breeze for eight hours, the bodies were cut down by a deputy at dawn. The woman at the roadside robbery scene later said there had been no rape; she had made the story up.

No one was ever charged with a lawless execution witnessed by thousands of Hoosiers in the public square.