Quotes About Justice

Why did Iwanski risk so much to save Jews? He told the author, "When a Jew cries, I cry. When a Jew suffers, I am a Jew. All are of my nation, for I am a man."i

No one has a monopoly on the truth, but the whole premise of our democracy is that truth and justice must win out. And the role of a trained journalist is to get as close to the truth as is humanly possible. Make no mistake: We are being tested. Without a vibrant, fearless free press, our great American experiment may fail.

Patriotism would require standing up to what I had seen, not standing alongside it in silence.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.

As John Adams wrote, a republic "is a government of laws, and not of men." A government of laws is a government of reason and a government of books. That was true of our founding and we must ensure it remains a hallmark of our future.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, who famously admonished his fellow jurists and the nation as a whole: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful." More than a half century later, the Supreme Court would validate Harlan's humanity with a unanimous decision in Brown v.

Looking back, the only ones who really paid for Abu Ghraib were the enlisted personnel, who were following orders, and General Taguba, who brought the problem to light.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, said, "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.

Grace is when God gives us what we don't deserve, and mercy is when God doesn't give us what we do deserve.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.

the moment you begin to believe you're worthy of the good things in your life - God gets all Old Testament on your ass and does something vicious, something insane, something totally uncalled for. He gives you lupus or He allows Satan to slaughter your children and cattle or He delivers Ohio to George W. Bush.

I'm thinking of killing everyone whose name is a palindrome

I'm a little uncomfortable with all of this.' 'With what?' 'Well... doesn't it feel weird that we're only beating up... ...Asian people?' 'We're in Hong Kong. The bad guys are Asian. The good guys are Asian. Everyone here's Asian.' 'I'm just used to beating up people of all races and creeds. That's how I do it in New York. ...

suggested a "compensating fantasy" here that builds on Smith's arrest and trial in South Bainbridge

Once in a while, I like to polish my halo by taking on a case pro bono.

I will warn you right now that I will not suffer things as cheerfully as do you." "Meaning?" "Meaning that if I perceive an injustice toward you, I will not let it pass without remark.

Leadership is not about doing what's popular, it is about doing what's right

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible.

Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.

I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.

carrying on a war in someone else's country, a country in no way implicated in attacking our own or anyone else's. To continue to do that against the intense wishes of most of the inhabitants of that country began to seem to me morally wrong.

At the time, many American air officers regarded what their allies the British were doing as mass murder.

most Americans have never recognized as "terrorist" in precisely the same sense the firestorms caused deliberately by U.S. firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden or Hamburg or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. These deliberate massacres of civilians, though not prosecuted after World War II like the Japanese slaughter in China at Nanking, were by any prior or reasonable criteria war crimes, wartime terrorism, crimes against humanity.

Property destruction is not violence--especially when it's directed against property that has been illegally constructed on public lands.