Quotes About Justice

As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. Go ahead, you're free now, the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn't think to give him money for the bus fare into town.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a "completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him," the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial.

Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become.

In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.

Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

Justice] demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.

and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.

But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.

The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible.

What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as precedent?

si personne ne peut rendre la justice, c'est que tout le monde est coupable.

Seuls ceux qui sont amoureux de la sagesse auraient envie de penser. Cela revient à une tautologie décevante. Pour être apte à penser, il faudrait aimer la beauté et la justice et donc avoir une âme bonne. Le monde serait divisé en bons et en méchants sans qu'on sache pourquoi. Cette division, c'est exactement ce que nous ne cherchions pas. Dès lors il faut reprendre l'analyse.

In the Nuremberg documents "not a single case could be traced in which an S.S. member had suffered the death penalty because of a refusal to take part in an execution" [Herbert Jäger, "Betrachtungen zum Eichmann-Prozess," in Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform, 1962].

It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.

Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann... On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.

This story took no more than perhaps ten minutes to tell, and when it was over - the senseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years in less than twenty-four hours - one thought foolishly: everyone, everyone should have his day in court.

As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution. He did

Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. (Robert H. Jackson, Justice at Nuremberg)

Another argument against extradition, offered by the observers the West German government sent to Jerusalem, was that Germany had abolished capital punishment and hence was unable to mete out the sentence Eichmann deserved. In view of the leniency shown by German courts to Nazi mass murderers, it is difficult not to suspect bad faith in this objection.

A melhor forma de determinar se uma pessoa foi expulsa do âmbito da lei é perguntar se, para ela, seria melhor cometer um crime. Se um pequeno furto pode melhorar a sua posição legal, pelo menos temporariamente, podemos estar certos de que foi destituída dos direitos humanos. Pois o crime passa a ser, então, a melhor forma de recuperação de certa igualdade humana, mesmo que ela seja reconhecida como exceção à norma.

Das den Nürnberger Prozessen zugrunde liegende Londoner Statut hat, wie bereits erwähnt, die Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit als unmenschliche Handlungen definiert, woraus dann in der deutschen Übersetzung die bekannten Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit geworden sind - als hätten es die Nazis lediglich an Menschlichkeit fehlen lassen, als sie Millionen in die Gaskammern schickten, wahrhaftig das Understatement des Jahrhunderts.