Quotes About Justice

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

Every insubordinate person, when he rises up against oppression, reaffirms thereby the solidarity of all men.

How many crimes are committed simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.

I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: 1) Irreparability in the event of an error of justice, 2) Detrimental moral influence of the execution procedure on those who, whether directly or indirectly, have to do with the procedure.

Our defense is not in our armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.

Bias against the Negro is the worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.

As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.

The high sentences—ten years' imprisonment each for convictions in Texas and California concerning possession of LSD and marijuana, and conviction (later overturned) with a sentence of thirty years' imprisonment for marijuana smuggling—show that the punishment of these offenses was only a pretext: the real aim was to put under lock and key the seducer and instigator of youth, who could not otherwise be prosecuted.

Put up a soul, put up a soul. Prepare me a body, an I will go an meet Justice on Calvary's brow!" He was so dramatic. In describing the crucifixion he said: "I see the sun when she turned herself black. I see the stars a fallin from the sky, and them old Herods comin out of their graves and goin about the city, an they knew 'twas the Lord of Glory.

It was necessary for black people to protest against segregation, King argued, to avoid cooperating with an evil system. If one passively accepted injustice, one enabled it to continue.

The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

The most important extra-curricular lesson we learned,—and we learned it properly,—was summed up in Chief Justice Jay's dictum that "justice is always the same, whether it be due from one man to a million, or from a million to one man." We learned this, not by precept, but by example, which is the best way to learn such lessons. In