Quotes About Justice

A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth.

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.

Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state.

How else to explain the right-wing charge that the poor, disabled, sick, and elderly are moochers and should fend for themselves? This is not simply an example of a kind of hardening of the culture, it is also part of a machinery of social and civic death that crushes any viable notion of the common good, public life, and the shared bonds and commitments that are necessary for community and democracy.

Some have spoken of the "American Century." I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come out of this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.

Christians alone are not allowed to say anything to clear themselves, to defend truth, to save a judge from injustice. That alone is looked for, which the public hate requires—the confession of the name, not the investigation of the charge. …

Gentlemen, I fervently trust that before long the principle of arbitration may win such confidence as to justify its extension to a wider field of international differences.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

Law never made men a whit more just.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison . . . the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.

Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others have done evil.

a good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself, which the neglect of legislators hath forgotten to supply.

To whom nothing is given, of him can nothing be required.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.