Quotes About Justice

You can't condemn a man for wanting peace. If you do, you condemn peace itself.

We were marching against the humiliation of the fact that your money can't buy a hot dog, can't rent a Holiday Inn. It was sense of the dollar dignity. We weren't fighting just to be with white people.

We've mistaken King's nonviolence for passivity. We've forgotten that his approach was more aggressive than anything the country had seen—that he used peaceful protest as a lever to force those in power to give up many of the privileges they'd hoarded.

To accept evil without challenging it, King concluded, would be to condone it.

And we are not wrong… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

If torture is permitted, it's hard to imagine what isn't.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

authorities often exploit their subordinates for their own benefit while believing they are perfectly just.

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression.

Cuando nadie responde ante nadie, cuando los vagos y los tramposos quedan impunes, todo se derrumba.

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.

Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything. Anyone who comes to the defense of the accused is obstructing the enactment of a collective ritual. Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.

Los estudiantes universitarios de hoy han vivido unos tiempos extraordinarios y, en consecuencia, muchos de ellos han desarrollado una extraordinaria pasión por la justicia social.

We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

El asesinato a menudo les parece virtuoso a los revolucionarios.

The Fairness/cheating foundation

No matter how often you do it with three-year-olds, they're just not ready to get the concept of fairness

Yet punish we do, and our propensity to punish turns out to be one of the keys to large-scale cooperation.

When a few members of a group contributed far more than the others—or, even more powerfully, when a few contributed nothing—most adults do not want to see the benefits distributed equally.51 We can therefore refine the description of the Fairness foundation that I gave in the last chapter.

I'll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right—the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.

If you fall asleep at the counsel table, the first thing you say when you wake up is, 'I object!

I used to believe in the idea that justice would prevail if you worked hard enough at it....I thought that if judges saw cheating right in front of them, they'd do something about it. The Woburn case gave me a depressing dose of reality.