Quotes About Justice

Once the fabric of a just society is undone, it takes generations to weave it back together.

Once war becomes a clash of absolutes, there is no breathing room for mercy. Absolute truth is blind truth.

Karma waits on the doorstep," meaning that a person may try to walk away from past actions, but like a dog sleeping by the door until its master returns, Karma can be endlessly patient. Eventually the universe will insist on redressing the balance of wrong with right.

The conclusion of this little package of insight is that there are no victims. Wise people often say this, but when they declare that all is wisely and justly ordered, their listeners remain baffled. What about wars, fires, random murders, aircraft disasters, despotism, gangsters, and on and on? All of these imply victims and often cruel victimizers, too.

The people who actually combat the world's injustice are not consumed by anger. They are clear-headed, self-possessed, and certain as to where their values lie.

Law of Karma says no debt in the universe ever goes unpaid.

Kings were no better than murderers, the only difference being that they had a legal monopoly on killing.

When I was growing up, we used to play basketball in a park that was never shoveled when it snowed. The basketball rims were never fixed. And we understood then that there was a relationship between public policy and our quality of life.

On August 1, 1933, Cummings submitted a proposal to the Justice Department, saying he dreamed of a "special prison" for the most notorious prisoners in the country, a place so remote that they would not be able to communicate with family, friends, or business associates, where they would be isolated as if "on an island, or in Alaska.

For example, suppose that the pain of a nose-breaking punch is equivalent to the pain of six months in jail. If we can deter one in nine such punches with the threat of three months' imprisonment, and catch half the offenders, we will wind up imposing four three-month sentences to deter one punch—a bad bargain from the utilitarian point of view.

The forces that will drive the whole world to become rich are temperate self-interest and temperate governance. As Adam Smith put it in 1755, "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

the liberal plan," as old Adam Smith wrote in 1776, "of [social] equality, [economic] liberty and [legal] justice," with a modest, restrained government giving real help to the poor.1 True modern liberalism.

The Harvard philosopher John Rawls articulated what he called the Difference Principle: if the entrepreneurship of a rich person made the poorest better off, then the higher income of the rich entrepreneur was justified.7 It makes a good deal of ethical sense. Equality does not.

People are motivated in varying proportions by prudence, temperance, courage, justice, faith, hope, and love, together with the corresponding vices.

But what gives human love its special poignancy, and gives human justice its special dignity, is the limit to life.

What will matter in fifty years in economic history is poverty and its ending, and in political history what will matter is tyranny and its ending. If poverty and tyranny are ended, the rest follows.

One of them told me that the United States Constitution gave Chad Lowe the right to bear arms." Junior paused."I asked him if it gave me the same right. He stopped laughing then, told me to try it and see.

I know knives and guns are not the answer. Once we get a fight like that started, who will have the power to stop it? How many deaths will be enough?

I expect you to come together as a race," Hambone answered. "I expect you to stop staring at the ground every time you speak to a white man that ain't a drop better than you. I expect you to be the men you were born to be, and to demand your God-given right to be human.

I had learned firsthand from my first release from prison that living-wage-paying jobs and black ex-felons don't go together in America. (I specifically say black ex-felons because studies have shown that white male ex-felons oftentimes have better paying job prospects and offers than blacks males with clean records or even college degrees. 4)

Yet and still, from the very first month that I stepped foot out of prison that second time, I have been under constant threat of re-incarceration, but not for committing crimes. That threat comes from the U.S. child support system—the only area in my life where the real prospect of me returning to a prison cell has been a viable possibility.

Probably all laws are useless, for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice.