Quotes About Justice

Men are blind in their own cause.

Thus, it was to seek true civilization and true justice for all the peoples of the world, and to view this as the destruction of personal freedom and respect is to be assailed by the hatred and emotion of war, and to make hasty judgments.

Here richly, with ridiculous display,The Politician's corpse was laid away.While all of his acquaintance sneered and slangedI wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.

But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious act and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck." 472

No rational man could worship a God so simply vengeful

The authorities in Yorkshire have rounded up their rioters, and divided them into those to be charged with affray and manslaughter, and those to be indicted for murder and rape. Rape? Since when do food riots involve rape? But I forget, this is Yorkshire."530

When Gregory says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did they do it?' But when he says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did the court find them so?' The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.

The king is good to those who think him good.

The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris: The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor's office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law.

At first they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale.

As for the future, the king's desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up.

Men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

we are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use.

If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.