Quotes About Justice

While we know it is possible to work for justice without being religious, we believe that religious faith presupposes a mandate to write, speak, and act for social justice.

The more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me that religion and feminism are different expressions of the same impulse toward making life more just and whole.

While Lucretia [Mott]'s public life was inspirational, I also want to to discuss her private life: her quiet actions. I agree with Lucretia's ethic that private acts of integrity are the foundation of a more just and more equitable society. She taught us that small moments of love in action can add up to potent agents of change.

The women's movement doesn't hate men. It hates patriarchy – a system created and supported by all of us, where men and women are legally, financially and socially unequal.

If there is to be a Fifth Wave [of feminism], what should our focus be? Here is my own messy, imperfect, difficult answer: structures, structures, structures. Social progress is fast, captivating, enthralling. It is ferociously beautiful to see the world change at the speed of speaking out. But those advances won't survive unless we do the hard work of economic and legal reform to support them

No war can ever be just air.

The women of Juarez, and women across the world, do not want to have to take revenge, any more than Procne and Philomela did. What they want is to be able to rely on the modern gods -- the police, the courts, and the media -- for justice.

As British writer Gordon Burn wrote in Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son (one of the very few good books written about serial killers),

There's a pattern in every crime - something that give us (the police) an edge on the criminal's weakness, and we know he has a weakness or he wouldn't be a criminal.

Maybe she was not really like that. It's just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified.

How did it go from "Füst should apologize to the woman he beat up" to "Füst should apologize to his fiancée" to "Füst should apologize to us"?

If someone threatens to kill you for speaking up about something they've done, they must be feeling their guilt. So maybe that's how you know you're on the right track.

I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power to torture and kill. The paths of history are stained with the blood of those who have fallen victim to "God's Avengers." Kings and Popes and military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God's authority and God's blessing. I do no believe in such a God.

And I end by challenging people to ask themselves whether we can continue to allow the government, subject as it is to every imaginable form of inefficiency and corruption, to have such power to kill.

A society that is unable to convince individuals of its ability to exact atonement for injury is a society that runs a constant risk of having its members revert to the wilder forms of [vigilante] justice Ã¢â'¬Â¦

I had also learned that the death penalty in the United States has always been most rigorously applied in Southern states - mostly toward those who kill whites.

Before, I had asked God to right the wrongs and comfort the suffering. Now I know - really know - that God entrusts those tasks to us.

He contends this is not an isolated case and explains that prosecutors, judges, and juries, most of whom are white, are far more outraged when white people are murdered than when black people are.

That's why you're never going to find a rich person on death row.

Finally, Millard says, summing it all up, race, poverty, and geography determine who gets the death penalty - if the victim is white, if the defendant is poor, and whether or not the local D.A. is willing to plea-bargain.

if I were to be murdered I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged. Especially by government — which can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.

Amnesty's investigation into the judicial processes of the hundred or so governments that impose the death sentence (the United States and Turkey are the only NATO countries that continue to execute) has revealed that without exception, the penalty of death is disproportionately meted out to "the poor, the powerless, the marginalized or those whom repressive governments deem it expedient to eliminate. No government gets it right.

They want to see him made accountable for his actions. They want to see him pay for what he did. So do I. In an ideal world, there would be no need for retribution. But in real societies, punishing the guilty is as integral to the function of law as exoneration the innocent and preventing crime.

Will you dare, I ask, to condemn the unfairness inherent in the judicial system which metes out one brand of justice for the rich and one for the poor?