Quotes About Justice

The thousands of black bodies incarcerated on death row are one legacy of lynching. The highest rates of execution in the United States can be correlated with those states where lynching was most prevalent. America's practice of lynching morphs rather than dies.

Syria should not belong to one family, to one coterie, or to one party. It belongs to all the people of Syria equally, in all their religious and ethnic diversity.

The people of Britain want a Home Secretary who will give them back their streets. They want a Home Secretary who will speak up for the victim, not the criminal.

Well, Sir, we do like to find out who kills people and why.

Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune.

I do not think... that any man has the right to take life. When he thinks he has he is at his most dangerous.

Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.

If they will play fair I will play fair, but if they won't then I reserve all my rights to do anything I find myself able to do.

Who would be a more suitable leader of a city or more worthy to rule over people than a philosopher? It is appropriate for him (if he really is a philosopher) to be wise, self-controlled, magnanimous, a judge of just and proper things, able to accomplish what he sets out to do, and able to endure pain. In addition to these things, he should be bold, fearless, able to face things that seem terrible, and also a benefactor, honest, and humane.

justice hath no meaning lest it be tempered with mercy."26

Usually we think a person is obligated to do something that would benefit many people, but what if that "something" is committing murder? Which is more important, doing good—or not doing wrong?

and line of cases. Justice Byron R. "Whizzer" White, a JFK appointee, dissented, calling Doe an act of "raw judicial power," as it took these decisions from the states and enshrined their determination in the Supreme Court's reasoning.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment; therefore the principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.

Judges are not final because they are infallible, but they are infallible only because they are final.

The framers discerned fundamental principles.... But our acceptance of the fundamental principles has not and should not bind us to those precise, at times anachronistic, contours. We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

I have long believed that the death penalty is in all circumstances a barbaric and inhuman punishment that violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its constitutional obligation to respect human dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by emulating the murderer who took his life. The fatal infirmity of capital punishment is that it treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans…. For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

Nations begin to dig their own graves when men talk more of human rights and less of human duties.

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.

The concrete man has but one interest—to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.

The difference between a good man and a bad man is the choice of cause.

The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.