Quotes About Justice

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong?

Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A

equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers.

Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society

Frederick agreed that the punishment of La Barre was extreme; for his part he would rather have condemned the youth to read the entire Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas; this, he thought, would be a fate worse than death.

When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master's philosophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he, Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it.

when men are friends, justice is unnecessary; but when men are just, friendship is still a boon." "A friend is one soul in two bodies." Yet friendship implies few friends rather than many; "he who has many friends has no friend"; and "to be a friend to many people in the way of perfect friendship is impossible.

heresy or blasphemy must be punished with death, even if the heretic should be one's closest kin.

a handful of might is better than a bagful of right.

Law is necessary because men are subject to passions; if all men were reasonable, law would be superfluous.

Obey even the unjust law, answers Spinoza, if reasonable protest and discussions are allowed and speech is left free to secure a peaceful change.

To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed[.]

Yet democracy is on the whole inferior to aristocracy.92 For it is based on a false assumption of equality; it "arises out of the notion that those who are equal in one respect (e.g., in respect of the law) are equal in all respects; because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal.

There are only three things worth while in this world—justice, beauty and truth; and perhaps none of them can be defined.

In other cities the process of decentralizing wealth was not so legal: the debtors of Mytilene massacred their creditors en masse, and excused themselves on the ground that they were hungry; the democrats of Argos (370) suddenly fell upon the rich, killed twelve hundred of them, and confiscated their property.

Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws . . .

but trial by combat was unknown.

the fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrimsas ($13,000);

A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have.

Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power" (557).

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free. Some