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Justice Quotes

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
            Abraham Lincoln

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
            Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
            Anatole France

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
            Aristotle

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.
            Benjamin Jowett

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
            Blaise Pascal

Charity begins at home and justice begins next door.
            Charles Dickens

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
            Clarence Darrow

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
            Dom Helder Camara

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
            Earl Warren

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
            Eleanor Roosevelt

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
            Eugene V. Debs

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
            Frederick Douglass

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
            Gloria Steinem

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.
            HH The Dalai Lama

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.
            Hierocles

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
            Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC

It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
            Hubert H. Humphrey

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
            Jane Addams

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
            Jimmy Carter

When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don't know about you, but I can't wait that long.
            Lya Sorano

The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
            Marian Wright Edelman

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
            Martin Luther King, Jr.

Conscience is the chamber of justice.
            Origen

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
            Paulo Freire

Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.
            Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.
            Spinoza

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
            Stephen Jay Gould

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them.
            Thomas Jefferson