Quotes About Justice

The only purpose of government—as opposed to the state of nature—is to replace "might makes right" with a system of justice.

One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way—by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court. Marshall was the anti-Rousseau, using words, not pictures, to get justice. Martin

For being found guilty of a savage attack on a female jogger that only by the grace of God didn't kill her, the defendants were each sentenced to five to ten years in prison, except Richardson, who got five to fifteen years. Former congressman Tom DeLay was sentenced to three years in prison for putting campaign money in the wrong account. All

A woman proved to the court that she had been arrested in a case of mistaken identity, but was executed because "since she's already here we might as well execute her too."54

Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and The Family. She conspired to kill cops, blow up buildings, and stage an armed robbery of the Brinks truck in Nanuet, New York. Sentenced to fifty-eight years in prison for felony murder and possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives, Rosenberg was released from prison by President Clinton on his last day in office. Just

President Clinton also pardoned sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists who had set off more than a hundred bombs in New York and Chicago in the seventies and eighties, killing a half dozen people and injuring more than seventy. They hadn't even asked for pardons. If

Thurgood Marshall was bringing lawsuits and winning case after case before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders.

Oh mighty King, you, who are so powerful you can take hundreds of thousands of lives at your whim. Show me how powerful you really are-give back just one life you've taken. Asoka (pg 82).

Reverend Downey tried to focus the service on remembering happy days with Amelia, but all I could think about was the unfairness of life. How was it possible that an irresponsible drunk could cause an accident, kill a perfectly innocent girl and walk away almost without a scratch? There seemed to be no justice in the world.

Don't do it, I said. Please? I mean, I understand that you want revenge, but two wrongs don't make a right. I didn't mean to sound like a teacher; the words just popped out.

Revenge is a dish best served cold

Las mentiras de los teóricos de la conspiración suscitan dudas sobre la honradez de quienes denuncian injusticias, aun cuando estén diciendo la verdad.

If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis."16

Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

God is both infinitely powerful and infinitely just. Why not, then, delight in the death throes of a sinful world?

Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.

Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts you at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.

The jail sentences for these men, if they are prosecuted at all, are invariably short. Many

It is time we realized that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist.

what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless. 

Antonin Scalia