Quotes About Justice

Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor "of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.

If the problems created by the industrial age were left unattended, Roosevelt cautioned, America would eventually be "sundered by those dreadful lines of division" that set "the haves" and the "have-nots" against one another.

Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity." Until blacks "stand on level and equal ground," we cannot rest. It must be our goal "to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.

We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.

if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong

He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension

tendency to substitute violence, murder, and lynching for the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution.

Even when abolition should come, Tocqueville predicted, Americans would "have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of

Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.

Still, Roosevelt noted, it was "not always easy to strike the just middle," and he inevitably made mistakes.

If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights.

To Lincoln's mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to "elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all." A

be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country." The standards

Lincoln always believed, he later said, that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and he could not remember when he did not "so think, and feel.

He found the courses at law school ill-suited to his temperament, noting critically that the professors were more concerned with "what law is, not what it ought to be," emphasizing legal precedents rather than justice.

We shall be branded with the steel of clinging shame if we leave the Philippines to fall into a welter of bloody anarchy," he proclaimed, "instead of taking hold of them and governing them with righteousness and justice, in the interests of their own people even more than in the interests of ours.

It was this case," Roosevelt later said, "which first waked me to . . . the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.

While the justices were well intentioned, they interpreted law solely from the vantage point of the propertied classes. "They knew nothing whatever of tenement house conditions," he charged, "they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities." In

Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?" "Yes," Ted had said. "Then I can't help you," Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy

That's what I feel too—people aren't taking responsibility for each other. You said the socialists had ceased to be a moral force, for the time, at least, because they wouldn't take moral responsibility. Except for a few people. You said that, didn't you—well then. But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that's not being responsible." "A very great

We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.

I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman's needs or desires.

People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn't make sense if you don't.

Shulamith Firestone