Quotes About Justice

In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon's southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority

Madiba reminds that democracy is more than just elections.

who do we consider a true member of the American family, deserving of the same rights, respect, and concern that we expect for ourselves?

Let the South," I said slowly, "spend every single penny of their treasure, which colored people have earned for them. Let them spill a drop of their own blood for every drop of colored people's blood they've spilled or contaminated. I have no pity and contemplate no mercy for the so-called bleeding Confederacy.

Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.

Why shouldn't our "great chain of being" include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?

To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire war machine, we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly—to us—applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the War on Poverty.

Barbara Ehrenreich

No one is morally justified in removing a man from his own soil, taking him to a faraway country and keeping him there by force. And no man is morally entitled to own another.

long time yet. I enjoyed sitting on the Woolsack where one of my greatest triumphs was to be able to support the bill for the immediate abolition of the slave trade, ending my speech with the words, 'Let us now set an example of humanity and justice which may be followed by all the nations of the earth.

If a man's been beat, and his woman's been raped, by any man, white or black or purple, you think that man's going to see God's face the way the man who wronged him tells him it is? God finds all sorts of ways to speak to those that need Him, Ben. He's a man with a sword, to those that need a rod and staff to comfort them, whether that man's called Ogu or St. James. He's the man with the keys in his hand to those that're in chains and seeking a way through the door to heaven.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

God speaks for the silent man.

God hates us, I said. Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants. They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive? When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.

How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

If you can't live by the laws the LORD God made for the world, they'll go into effect regardless.

Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.

I'll never get over my grappling for balance, never stop believing life is going to be fair , the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided.

You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?

So I am the one who quietly takes stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn't know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.