Quotes About Justice

compensation that was often paid not to the victim herself but to her father or husband, since rape counted less as sexual violence against a woman than as a property crime against her male guardian.

In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law.

hard for me to hear the constant refrain of "just preach the gospel." When the topic is abortion, nobody says, "just preach the gospel." We preach against abortion as if it's a gospel issue. When the topic is sex trafficking, no one says "just preach the gospel." We develop a battalion to go and get people out of sex trafficking. And we should because these are crucial issues. But so is racial justice!

You have to be intrinsically changed by God in order for justice to be done. In other words, justice doesn't come by legislation, because you can legislate things and nothing changes. We can go to the executive branch. We can go to the legislative branch. We can go to the judicial branch. We can put whatever kind of Supreme Court justices we want to put in place. But at the end of the day legislation doesn't change hearts … only the gospel does.

The Woke Church is one that is aware of the urgent needs in its community and does more than just talk about those needs

You can speak on justice and race with rhetorical excellence, but if the gospel isn't presented, heart change won't happen.

However, if one is regenerated by the gospel, yet unaware of the double consciousness of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in America, one's clarity on justice and race issues will be clouded and even absent. Therefore, to be fully woke, one needs to have all three aspects of consciousness.

Speak out for those who cannot speak"—who in the church today realizes that this is the very least that the Bible requires of us?

As President Truman put it, "Being an American is more than a matter of where you or your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal.

Such people neither steal, nor murder, nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. But . . . they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest. They will either be destroyed by this unrest, or they will become the most hypocritical of all Pharisees.

Do the right thing, seek the truth, defend the weak, live courageous lives.

Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself. I recently came across the fairy tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which really is relevant for our time. All we are lacking today is the child who speaks up at the end. We ought to put it on as a play.

he now began to think of the church as called by God to "stand with those who suffer.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless.

It was indeed a reply to every thing that had been said against the Address; but there was such an exquisite choice of expression, and pronounced with such rapidity, that we are unable to do it justice in any account we can give of it.

We pretend we would have spoken out for the Jews in Bonhoeffer's day, or that we would have spoken against the slave trade in Wilberforce's day, but are we speaking out today on the issues that are no less important to God in our time? If not, we are deceiving ourselves.

The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue.

He understood that the law could not force people to do what was right. In fact, the laws of America didn't try to do this. They provided freedom, and what the citizens did with that freedom was something else altogether. "Thus," Tocqueville writes, "while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust." He

In one conversation that September in Geneva, Visser 't Hooft asked Bonhoeffer what he prayed for. "If you want to know the truth," Bonhoeffer replied, "I pray for the defeat of my nation. For I believe that is the only way to pay for all the suffering which my country has caused in the world.

He and his allies declared that every human being was equal in God's sight and made in the image of God, and must therefore be treated with equal dignity.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that those liberties are the gift of God? That they are violated but with his wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep for ever. If

As the world recognizes Wilberforce, his work, and his Savior, let us not fall into former pits of forgetfulness.

What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia.

We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the "will of God.