Quotes About Justice

Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong - which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed; they just fail to act on that knowledge.

Expanding health coverage is not a technical issue but a political one; it should be seen as a right and a means to development.

I would not allow CIA to undertake activity that is immoral, even if it is technically legal.

I am not an economist... I am not a business technician. I am a revolutionary, and I do what is right for an economic revolutionary.

Courts are supposed to be places of reason. But this, of course, is a fantasy. I mean, there is reason being used as a technique. But courts, in fact, are baths of emotions.

My first cousin, by the way, on my father's mother side was John Marshall Harlan, who was a Supreme Court justice, as was his grandson. And I think a lot of my fight and my work to struggle for fairness and the techniques of theater and in subject matter probably stems in some way from some sense I have of his issues in life.

When Colin Kaepernick first took a knee, he took it, and he identified police brutality, aggressive policing techniques, he broadened it to things like oppression to inequality.

Enhanced interrogation is not to be considered lightly, but the use of enhanced interrogation techniques does not require moral people to abandon their beliefs. Rather, it is precisely during these difficult times that one's beliefs about life, justice and mercy become indispensible.

I've taken on impossible fights before and won and I've done it not by taking on the tactics and techniques of demagogues and bullies but by calling people to our higher angels, calling to the moral imagination of communities about what we can be and what we can achieve together.

We're living in an age where new technology offers gigantic upsides - artificial intelligence has the potential to diagnose cancer, catch serial killers and reduce prison populations.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

Ted Hastings is the guy you would hope would be part of the police. He's got his problems, but is relentless in the pursuit of the truth.

When I was in Congress, I worked with Joe Kennedy to rename the Justice Department for Bobby, and when I retired, Teddy Kennedy sent me this Roy Lichtenstein print of his brother, inscribed: 'Bobby would have been proud of you.'

Juvenile justice is probably the area that's most ripe for reform, in the nice liberal sense of the word, simply because there's no getting around the fact that a teenage brain is not an adult brain.

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

Teenagers want to be able to fight for what's right - but finding out what's right is now 90 percent of the battle.

I actually worked with an organization called Drama Club that works with incarcerated teens and youth in a detention center and in Rikers Island, which a lot of people don't know that teens have been incarcerated in Rikers Island.

David Allan Coe actually went to jail one time. Some fan cursed Lynyrd Skynyrd, and David Allan Coe kicked his teeth in. He ran and kicked a guy's teeth in for saying something about Lynyrd Skynyrd.

A law has to have teeth.

I cut my teeth on religious liberty issues.

A street criminal can steal only what he can carry, but with a stroke of a pen, the dialing of a telephone or the pushing of a computer key, the white collar criminal can and does steal billions.

It's my job, with the position of power that I'm in and being able to be on television, I'm supposed to stand up for the people who can't stand up for themselves.

I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.

Redemption isn't giving a bank robber a job as a teller.