Quotes About Justice

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Exodus 23:8–"And thou shalt take no gift; for a gift blindeth them that have sight and perverteth the words of the righteous.

After all, the reciprocity rule asserts that if justice is to be done, exploitation attempts should be exploited. READER

How the hell can you be liberated and accept alimony?" I said. Again the smile, innocent, beautiful, glorious, and satanic. "Exploit the oppressor," she said.

no one should confuse income for virtue, net worth for worthiness. The underlying reality is that capitalism is not working as it should or as it can.

The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. "The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

Don't separate race from class. Racial discrimination is aggravating class divides, and wider inequality is worsening racial divides.

Commitments to social responsibility are also conveniently reassuring to talented or privileged young people who want to do good while also doing well, and who don't want to acknowledge the cruel joke that, as Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, has pointed out, people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

We're not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We're in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations.

As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has written, "The most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments with which society rewards specially useful or meritorious functions," while accusing the underprivileged of "lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire.

My conclusion is that the only way to reverse course is for the vast majority who now lack influence over the rules of the game to become organized and unified

As the great jurist and Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We may have democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

Let America be America again," pleaded Hughes: "The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free. / The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—

It's scandalous that the four hundred richest Americans should pay an average of 17 percent tax on their incomes, a rate lower than that paid by many in the middle class.

In the half century spanning 1958 to 2008, the average effective tax rate of the richest 1 percent of Americans—including all deductions and tax credits—dropped from 51 percent to 26 percent.

We cannot tolerate inordinate wealth for the few along with unbridled money in politics. As the great jurist and Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We may have democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.

The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a health-care system in which they can buy care that others can't, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

It is well if you go in for revenge to make it as complete as possible.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that /needs/ no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we /must/ stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.