Quotes About Justice

The common problem, yours and mine, everyone's/Is not to fancy what were fair in life/Provided it could be—but finding first/What may be and how to make it fair up to our means.

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

The way to find justice is to deal fairly with other people and not worry about how they deal with you.

A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it—it keeps him upright.

Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in all law schools.

Everybody is equal. Everybody! That's the law. They are? Only from on top.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs.

She might say: "This mess will clear up if you take that troublemaker there — What's your name? You, with the goatee — out and shoot him. Do it now."--Glory Road; Heinlein

See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it's sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn't order it, didn't know it, and wouldn't have permitted it had they known. At worst they shut their eyes to it—afterwards—rather than upset their own applecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country.

Hendrick, I have explained these matters to you because it is useless to punish a man unless he knows why he is being punished.

I'm not suggesting anything. People get hurt every day. This matter must be cleared up, Joseph, for everybody. The greatest good of the greatest number, as you are so fond of quoting.

There is no such thing as a humane war.

Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it a 'good.

Jubal longed for the days when a lawyer could cite the Bill of Rights and not have some over-riding Federation trickery defeat him.

there used to be, dirtside, a legal defenses called diminished capacity and not guilty by reason on insanity. These concepts would bewilder a Loonie. In Luna City a man would necessarily be of diminished mental capacity to even think about rape; to carry one out would be the strongest possible proof of insanity - but among Loonies such mental disorders would not gain a rapist any sympathy. loonies do not psychoanalyze a rapist; they kill him. Now. Fast. Brutally.

Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person.

I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people—and parasites.

To be court-martialed—for any reason—is eight times as bad for an officer as for an enlisted man. Offenses which will get privates kicked out (maybe with lashes, possibly without) rate death in an officer. Better never to have been born!

Harshaw held that certain feet were made for stepping on, in order to improve the breed, promote the general welfare, and minimize the ancient insolence of office; he had seen at once that Heinrich had such feet.

For some tense moments it seemed that we were going to be hanged or shot or at least locked up forever in their deepest dungeon for the crime of not being Californians.

Almost all crime depends on the acquiescence of the victim. If the victim refuses his assigned role, the criminal is placed at a disadvantage - one so severe, that it usually takes an understanding and compassionate judge to set things right. I had broken the rules. I had fought back.

Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault.

So far as I have listened, before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts.

Democrats were being rounded up, sentenced by drumhead courts-martial (provost's tribunals, they were called) and executed on the spot—laser, gunfire, some hangings.