Quotes About Justice

I have placed the keys of the whole universal Church in your hands, and over that which I have redeemed by the spilling of my own blood, I placed you as my vicar.… I, however, who have given you such and so many things, do not find law or justice in your balance, and I depart from your tribunals despised and unavenged.41

In the same decades that saw the rise of mass incarceration, the number of beds available in state mental hospitals across the country dropped from 339 beds per 100,000 people in 1955 to under 20 beds per 100,000 people by 2015. There are now ten times as many mentally ill people in our prisons and jails as there are in state mental institutions.

Make no mistake about this: destroy the liberty of the least among us and you destroy the principle that guarantees liberty to all.

Feeling like God is far away, disinterested, or dead to you is part of our Bible and can't be brushed aside. And that feeling—no matter how intense it may be, and even offensive as it may seem—is never judged, shamed, or criticized by God. Worshipping other gods or acting unjustly toward others gets criticized about every three sentences, but not this honest talk of feeling abandoned by God.

Wherever you find human misery, you find lawyers, either causing it or making a profit from it.

Lawyers had abolished the simple concept of right and wrong, turning it into degrees of guilt.

sic] his reaction was a sign of civilization. Nobody reaches for a gun anymore, just for his lawyer.

In any decent civilization, healthcare is a right, not a privilege.

he said that for wickedness to succeed all it takes is for decent people to do nothing.

They would have thought me mad, even Kristabel. Flying carriages. People who live forever. Hundreds of inhabited worlds. Machine servants instead of genistars. Cities where Makkathran would be naught but a small district. A civilization where justice was available to all. Aliens. More stars in the sky than it is possible to count. No, such marvels of my fevered imagination were best kept inside my skull.

his reaction was a sign of civilization. Nobody reaches for a gun anymore, just for his lawyer.

Now Savi was playing her part in making sure no other innocents got hurt by psychotic ideologues who believed they had an absolute right to use force to achieve their goal.

It had to be done, they were determined about that; some attempt had to be made to break the cycle of crime and poverty.

We fight them in a thousand small ways each day, my young friend. That is how decent people will triumph in the end.

Those who do not accept due process, who refuse to acknowledge the democratic mandate, are a cancer on society.

Often to do what's right you first have to do what's wrong.

Teaching the police to be more sensitive to the most exploited and oppressed is only a strategy designed to prevent police heavy-handedness from unintentionally sparking rebellions as they trample people in the performance of their duties.

Though they are now largely silent, the voices from the seventeenth century still speak to us from the innumerable texts and images we are fortunate to possess. They offer a warning of the dangers of entrusting power to those who feel summoned by God to war, or feel that their sense of justice and order is the only one valid.

rights are for the people whom we fear or dislike because they are the people who need them.

The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. It was like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

Nobody on earth is more righteous than a seventeen year old. (244)

I think there should be tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse.

No shit," Jack murmured. He was truly awed and relieved. The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. It was like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.