Quotes About Justice

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

As I see it, only God can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power. Thus there is no authority on earth so inherently worthy of respect, or invested with a right so sacred, that I would want to let it act without oversight or rule without impediment (p. 290).

I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.

If we can't begin to agree on fundamentals, such as the elimination of the most abusive forms of child labor, then we really are not ready to march forward into the future.

Is life worth living? Yes, so long As there is wrong to right, Wail of the weak against the strong, Or tyranny to fight;

The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry.

Revenge is for dreams...never for reality.

The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.

Vorga, I kill you filthy.

We don't punish criminals in our enlightened age, we cure 'em; and the cure is worse than punishment.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

It is a confession of the weakness of our own faith in the righteousness of our cause when we attempt to suppress by law those who do not agree with us." Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York after WWI

The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God.

My mom was a teacher. In the 1960s and '70s, she taught history at two largely African American public high schools in Washington, D.C. - McKinley Tech and H.D. Woodson. Her example taught me the importance of equality for all Americans.

Governmental intervention and personal responsibility are not mutually exclusive issues, but they do frame a 'do it ourselves' vs. 'what are you doing for us' debate. For the black community, that's a debate that's been raging at least as far back as the W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington philosophical grudge matches.

In 1985, I was arrested, along with my mother and brother, Martin III, in a protest against apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

In the end, we may be hurting the very people we should be concerned about - the inner-city poor, those who already have to live with many risks in their daily lives, those who do not have clout here in Washington.

The March on Washington was a culmination of years of hard work and dedication of many individuals.

There still is a war on women in terms of politicians in Washington and the state legislatures trying to eliminate any rights we have fought to win and that the Supreme Court has afforded us.

Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans - working families, children, the elderly, the poor - or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.

Before running for the Washington State Senate in 2014, I had spent 20 years as an activist. I had always believed that we needed to push for change on the outside, through community organizing and advocacy.

We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!

Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate of a phone book factory, a GTE factory in Los Angeles. They were using thousand-year-old trees to make phone books. I think that's a total waste of a tree.