Quotes About Justice

The American poet Vachel Lindsay declaimed:   Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

The labor leader Eugene V. Debs, for whom Hardie had campaigned years before, left a sickbed in 1918 to give a series of antiwar speeches, for which he, too, was thrown behind bars. The judge told him he might get a lesser sentence if he repented. "Repent?" asked Debs. "Repent? Repent for standing like a man?" Still in his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, in 1920, he would receive nearly a million votes for president on the Socialist ticket.

John Newton had written that he was relieved to have left the trade because "I considered myself as a sort of gaoler or turnkey . . . perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles." But to leave behind a career as a prison guard is one thing; to call for closing all prisons entirely another.

A sense of rights can be contagious

Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire.

Only half a dozen years earlier Stanley had deserted from the U.S. Navy, but now he noted with satisfaction how "the incorrigible deserters . . . were well flogged and chained.

An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a "hue and cry." But

Sir Archibald Bodkin (best known to history as the man who later would get James Joyce's novel Ulysses banned from publication in postwar England), thundered accusingly that "war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong.

two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum. Copying

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.

The most sacred laws of justice are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbor.

Lawyers and attorneys, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.

the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

We see frequently societies of merchants in London, and other trading towns, purchase waste lands in our sugar colonies, which they expect to improve and cultivate with profit, by means of factors and agents, notwithstanding the great distance and the uncertain returns, from the defective administration of justice in those countries.

Pour élever un État du dernier degré de barbarie au plus haut degré d'opulence, il ne faut que trois choses : la paix, des taxes modérées et une administration tolérable de la justice. Tout le reste est amené par le cours naturel des choses.

Deuxième maxime. - La taxe ou portion d'impôt que chaque individu est tenu de payer doit être certaine, et non arbitraire.

Suppose that government is founded on contract, and that these powers are entrusted to persons who grossly abuse them, it is evident that resistance is lawful, because the original contract is now broken. But we showed before that government was founded on the principles of utility and authority. We also showed that the principle of authority is more prevalent in a monarchy, and that of utility in a democracy, from their frequent attendance on public meetings and courts of justice.

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.

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.

Revenge is the foolish stepbrother of justice.

Revenge is the foolish stepbrother of justice. I understood

What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

There is no worse feeling than being unable to assuage the suffering of the innocent.