Quotes About Justice

Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.

Because when you can't hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire.

What's disturbing, then, is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about hell here and now. As a Christian I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth: poverty, injustice, suffering--they're all hells on earth and as Christians we oppose them with all of our energies.

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God? Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?

as the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. (That's in the Bible. Word for word.)

What you find in the Bible are stories accurately reflecting the dominant consciousness of the day, and yet right in among and sometimes even within those very same violent stories, you find radically new ideas about freedom, equality, justice, compassion, and love. New ideas sit side by side with old ideas. Vicious violence is right there next to new understandings of peace and justice. (Kind of like now.)

Because when you can't hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire. History

Life is too short to help make a world you don't want to live in.)

So when people say they don't believe in hell and they don't like the word "sin," my first response is to ask, "Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested?

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we've bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.

The workers all get paid the same because you can't divide the infinite

When we hear people saying they can't believe in a God who gets angry—yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard the food supply? What kind of God wouldn't get angry at a financial scheme that robs thousands of people of their life savings?

This is what happens when good people do nothing.

When we lose faith in our officers of the law, it harms all of as. It cripples our criminal justice system. It threatens the most vulnerable parts of our community. It allows money and power to subvert justice.

Her strategy for honoring the dead had always been to take action - solve the mystery, punish the criminal. But what did you do when there was no one to punish? When there were no answers to find? How do you assimilate that kind of loss without losing your mind?

Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?

It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws.

Luther King gave people "the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be," Bayard Rustin said—in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-violent resistance, that had been forged on the Montgomery battlefield.

At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; "That's where I'm needed," he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. "I just happened to be there," he was to say. "There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.

One of the wise, practical people around the table" urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn't waste his power on lost causes—no matter how worthy the cause might be. "The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn't to expend it on this," he said. "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" Lyndon Johnson replied.

It was as a result of his courage that two white men were on trial for killing a Negro, a trial in which, whatever the result, "there is a kind of majesty. And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four.

That campaign raises, in fact, one of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson; the relationship between means and ends. Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson's life, civil rights, in particular, perhaps, but others too, were noble. Heroic advances in the cause of social justice....Those noble ends would not have been possible without the means, far from noble, that brought Johnson to power...To what extent are ends inseparable from means?

I swore then and there," Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it." It was at Cotulla, Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that my dream began of an America Ã¢â'¬Â¦ where race, religion, language and color didn't count against you.