Quotes About Justice

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair. In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Advocates of capitalism like to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to those who try to remedy it.

In the modern world, those whom we effectively hate are distant groups, especially foreign nations. We conceive them abstractly, and deceive ourselves into the belief that acts which are really embodiments of hatred are done from love or justice or some lofty motive. Only a large measure of skepticism can tear away the veils which hide this truth from us.

Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.

If] we wish to diminish the love of money which, we are told, is the root of all evil, the first step must be the creation of a system in which everyone has enough and no one has too much.

There is equality where all are slaves, as well as where all are free. This shows that equality, by itself, is not enough to make a good society.

Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code.

The three things needed to prevent revolution are government propaganda in education, respect for law, even in small things, and justice in law and administration, i.e., "equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own" (1307a, 1307b, 1310a).

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice.

Next, he points out that good men are better to live among than bad men, and therefore he cannot be so foolish as to corrupt his fellow-citizens intentionally; but if unintentionally, then Meletus should instruct him, not prosecute him.

Plato's Socrates had argued that to inflict injustice was a greater evil to the perpetrator than to suffer it.

Men would be chosen for jobs on account of fitness to do the work, not because they flattered the irrational dogmas of those in power.

One of the persistant delusions of mankind is that some sections of the human race are morally better or worse than others. This belief has many different forms, none of which has any rational basis.

Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

Most people in civilized communities do not steal, and I think the usual motive is the great likelihood of punishment here on earth. This is borne out by the fact that in a mining camp during a gold rush, or in any such disorderly community, almost everybody steals.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world.

Suffering to the criminal can never be justified by the notion of vindictive punishment. If education combined with kindness is equally effective, it is to be preferred; still more is it to be preferred if it is more effective.

Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed, God's mercies are curiously selective.

Bertrand Russell