Quotes About Justice

For two things be ever ready: First, to do that only which reason, the sovereign and legislative faculty, suggests for the good of mankind: Secondly, to change your course on meeting any one who can correct and alter your opinion. But let the change be made because you really believe it to be in the interest of justice or the public good, or such like, and not with any view to pleasure or glory for yourself.

Liebgott stuck the Luger between the mayor's eyes and pulled the trigger. The Luger misfired. Right when it clicked, this German went off running down the road. Speirs said, 'Shoot him.' One of our men shot and missed. I shot about thirty feet over the mayor's head. Another man brought him down. I won't say who. --Don Bond

The only course open is to pledge myself to the cause of making sure that the things he died for are not forgotten.

The book of Proverbs makes the same point: Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (14.31)

The focus of a politics of compassion is the alleviation of suffering caused by social structures.

Do we think that peace on earth comes from Caesar or Christ? Do we think it comes through violent victory or nonviolent justice? Advent, like Lent, is about a choice of how to live personally and individually, nationally and internationally.

Eschatology is not, of course, about the destruction of the earth, but about its transfiguration, not about the end of the world, but about the end of evil, injustice, violence—and imperialism.

The terrible truth is that our world has never established peace through victory. Victory establishes not peace, but lull. Thereafter, violence returns once again, and always worse than before. And it is that escalator violence that then endangers our world.

We face a similar choice each Christmas, and so each Advent is a time of repentance for the past and change for the future. Do we think that peace on earth comes from Caesar or Christ? Do we think it comes through violent victory or nonviolent justice? Advent, like Lent, is about a choice of how to live personally and individually, nationally and internationally.

God's dream for us is not simply peace of mind, but peace on earth.

In the Bible, the political issues—which are also religious—are about economic justice and fairness, peace and nonviolence.

Jesus was deeply affected and concerned about the sufferings and inequities of his day. So much so that he dedicated his entire life to the welfare of others.

The first passion of Jesus was the kingdom of God, namely, to incarnate the justice of God by demanding for all a fair share of a world belonging to and ruled by the covenantal God of Israel

To put that threefold summary into three phases, there was to Jesus, first, a Spirit dimension, second, a wisdom dimension, and, third, a justice dimension.

Thus, in a narrower sense, the dream of God is a social and political vision of a world of justice and peace in which human beings do not hurt or destroy, oppress or exploit one another.

Righteous people are those who do what is right.

So the issue is not character flaws among the elites. The issue, rather, is a system in which some people sleep on beds made of ivory while others end up being sold for the price of a pair of sandals.

The passion for social justice that we see in the prophets is a protest against systemic evil. Systemic evil is an important notion: it refers to the injustice built into the structures of the system itself.

I need both of these words, "compassion" and "justice," for compassion without justice easily gets individualized or sentimentalized, and justice without compassion easily sounds like politics.

The Roman vision incarnated in the divine Augustus was peace through victory. The Christian vision incarnated in the divine Jesus was peace through justice. It is those alternatives that are at stake behind all the titles and countertitles, the claims and counterclaims.

and mediators of the sacred and, at worst, a snare. He knew an oppressive and exploitative social order that legitimated itself in the name of God, and he knew this was not God's will. And he knew all of this most foundationally because he knew God.

We can now see that the fundamental difference between those divergent visions of earth's final kingdom is not about ends, but about means. The imperial kingdom of Rome—and this may indeed apply to any other empire as well—had as its program peace through victory. The eschatological kingdom of God has as its program peace through justice. Both intend peace—one by violence, the other by nonviolence. And still those tectonic plates grind against one another.

This claim is also the central theme of Abraham Heschel's The Prophets. Heschel

Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom.