Quotes About Justice

righteousness - the moral justification to act with cruelty.

What was so terrible about properly funded hospitals, student grants, decent working conditions, affordable houses, trains that ran for convenience not profit, water that poured from the tap whose function was to slake your thirst not to make shareholders a dividend. What exactly was so wicked about public libraries, free eye tests and council houses? We may be coming to realise that the people who complain about the nanny state are the people who had nannies.

Stone reckoned that most of the innocent people in prison had been sent there by police officers and prosecutors who reasoned that these victims were, after all, probably guilty of something, and better a conviction of an innocent person than no conviction at all.

For the record, I'd like to say that I'm a big fan of forgiveness as long as I have a chance to get even first Kinsey Millhone, V is for Vengeance

You kill people you hate or you kill in rage or you kill to get even, but you don't kill someone you're indifferent to.

At heart, I've always been a pretty little moralist. Private investigation is just my way of acting out.

I've given this a great deal of thought and what I've realized is that revenge doesn't have to be an eye for an eye. Retaliation can take any number of forms. It doesn't need to be crude or obvious. The point is, the pain should be equivalent; not tit for tat but something comparable.

I'm not saying justice is for sale, but if you have enough money, you can sometimes enjoy the benefits of a short-term lease.

We live in a society piously concerned about the rights of criminals when their victims' lives have been trashed without any consideration of the price in pain and suffering.

I was more pissed off in retrospect than I'd been at the time. I know there are people who believe you should forgive and forget. For the record, I'd like to say I'm a big fan of forgiveness as long as I'm given the opportunity to get even first.

The Universe keeps track of our sins and exacts devious and repugnant punishments, like dates with unknown men.

Law and order, punishment and fair play, are all on a continuum where there are far more gray stretches than there are black and white.

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.

It has come as a great revelation to me," I wrote her, "that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.

the time to assert one's right is when it's denied!

You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred. It can't on defining everything.

I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country's wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people's lives. (from 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter'.)

My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment. The sorrow of it had faded, but regret remained, and I'd taken to wondering if the Fates might be kinder to a different girl.

But benevolent patriarchy is still patriarchy.

Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet. The time to assert one's right is when it's denied!

since for all I knew, people might come back one day as the very thing they killed.

We can't think about changing our skin... change the world, that's how we gotta think.

By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I'd just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I'd lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.