Welcome to our collection of quotes about justice and it's opposite, injustice. We all want justice served, but served fairly and quickly. Making sure that happens can be an ethical minefield... does following the letter of the law always serve just causes? Do people really get the karma they deserve, whether it be good or bad?

We hope you find these quotes thought provoking and interesting. If you do, please share with others, and please consider linking back to us. Enjoy!

Honest people, mistakenly believing in the justice of their cause, are led to support injustice.

--Elihu Root

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

--Mahatma Gandhi

Individuals can resist injustice, but only a community can do justice.

--James J. Corbett

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.

--Benjamin Cardozo

Law and justice are not always the same.

--Gloria Steinem

Longer Version:

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


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

--Abraham Lincoln

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

--Henry David Thoreau

Every time a person sacrifices himself for a larger injustice, it aids in the cycle of change.

--Amy Carter

Justice without wisdom is impossible.

--James Anthony Froude

Thou shalt not ration justice.

--Learned Hand

He who spares the bad injures the good.

--Publilius Syrus

Peace without justice is tyranny.

--William Allen White

Extreme justice is often injustice.

--Jean Racine

Justice in the extreme is often unjust.

--Jean Racine

In order to establish peace, you must have fair justice for everyone.

--Al Sharpton

Justice is such a fine thing that we cannot pay too dearly for it.

--Alain Rene Le Sage

Justice is never given; it is exacted.

--A. Philip Randolph

Justice is social happiness. It is happiness guaranteed by a social order.

--Hans Kelsen

Justice discriminates according to merit, according to the relevant excellence.

--Michael J. Sandel

When justice on offenders is not done, Law, government, and commerce, are o'erthrown.

--John Denham

Truth Justice loves, and truth injustice fears,
Truth above all things a just man reveres.

--John Denham

We lay our case before you
Let your hammer fall
Tip the scales of justice
Liberty for all.

--Petery Rooney Byford

The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government.

--George Washington

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

--Haile Selassie

Justice is the constant and perpetual will to allot to every man his due.

--Domitus Ulpian

If we won't fight injustice wherever we see it, then we are not safe from suffering injustice ourselves.

--Peter Hitchens

There can be racism in a system even if a particular episode of injustice is not a manifestation of that racism. Every single thing in the criminal justice system is not a manifestation of racism, but many things are.

--James Forman, Jr.

A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.

--John Rawls

Men are always invoking justice; and it is justice which should make them tremble.

--Madame Swetchine

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

--Wendell Berry

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

--John Rawls

Justice is the most political and/or institutional of the virtues. The legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice.

--Alan Ryan

Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

--John Galsworthy

Justice like the sunflower hangs its head on the sunny side.

--Abraham Miller

Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.

--Hugo Claus

Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.

--Anatole France

To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer it.

--Plato

It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.

--David Gallagher

Tyranny and injustice always produce cunning and falsehood.

--Maria Edgeworth

When innocence trembles, it condemns the judge.

--Publilius Syrus

Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.

--Bryan Stevenson

Whether we are religious or nonreligious, today we can go online to meet the needs once served in religious spaces: to connect, but also to confess our secrets, seek out information, process tragedies, and pursue a more just world.

--Chris Stedman

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

--William Ewart Gladstone

Justice requires that to lawfully constituted Authority there be given that respect and obedience which is its due; that the laws which are made shall be in wise conformity with the common good; and that, as a matter of conscience all men shall render obedience to these laws.

--Pope Pius XI

Early on he had been told the famous maxim of American justice, that it was better that a hundred men go free than that one innocent man be punished. Struck almost dumb by the beauty of the concept, he became an ardent patriot. America was his country. He would never leave America.

--Mario Puzo

A basic principle of American justice holds that a bad man has the same rights as a good man.

--Massad Ayoob

To have the power of forgetting, for the time, self, friends, interests, relationship; and to think of doing right toward another, a stranger, an enemy, perhaps, is to have that which men can share only with the angels, and with Him who is above men and angels.

--David Dudley

Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.

--Martin Luther King Jr.


Embracing our brokenness creates a need and a desire for mercy and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.

--Bryan Stevenson

The law is not an ass but a chameleon in ass skin: it turns deathly black when around blacks and pristine white when around whites.

--Agona Apell

Far too often, to be charged with a crime is to become something less than human.

--Jerome F. Buting

The justice system is now just a system.

--Bob Enyart

Race determines everything in the criminal justice system.

--Mark Geragos

We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters.

--Martin Luther King Jr.

If you give yourself totally to the nonviolence struggle for peace and justice you also find that people give you their hearts and you will never go hungry and never be alone.

--Cesar Chavez

Why are people that poor? Why are people that broke? Why are people that food insecure, that clothing insecure, that they feel like their only shot, that they are shooting their shot by walking through a broken glass window to get what they need?

--Kimberly Jones

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

--Michelle Alexander

There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.

--Chris Hedges

Injustice and corruption will never be transformed by keeping them hidden, but only by bringing them out into the light and confronting them with the power of love.

--Martin Luther King Jr.

It takes courage to speak up against complacency and injustice while others remain silent. But that's what leadership is.

--Rosabeth Moss Kanter

No democracy can exist unless each of its citizens is as capable of outrage at injustice to another as he is of outrage at unjustice to himself.

--Aristotle

One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.

--Julian Assange

Black lives matter, as a subset of all lives matter. So any injustices to a particular group must be addressed specific to that group but under the banner that all life is created in the image of God.

--Tony Evans

Judicial excellence means that a Supreme Court justice must have a sense of the values from which our core of our political- economic system goes. In other words, we should not approve any nominee whose extreme judicial philosophy would undermine rights and liberties relied upon by all Americans.

--Herb Kohl

Freedom is incomplete without social justice.

--Atal Bihari Vajpayee

I've always privately suspected that Jesus is in favor of revolutionaries, seeing as how he was a bit of one himself.

--G.N. Chevalier

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

--Amartya Sen

Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.

--Bob Dylan

A unjust law, is no law at all.

--Martin Luther

A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

--H. G. Wells

Do not make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice.

--Bryant McGill

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

--Isaiah Berlin

To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.

--Confucius

Democracy is an objective. Democratization is a process. Democratization serves the cause of peace because it offers the possibility of justice and of progressive change without force.

--Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

--William J. Murray

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

--Origen

I want to live in a world where people become famous because of their work for peace and justice and care. I want the famous to be inspiring; their lives an example of what every human being has it in them to do -- act from love!

--Patch Adams

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

--Walt Whitman

If you want peace, work for justice.

--Pope Paul VI

I think the first duty of society is justice.

--Alexander Hamilton

Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.

--Thomas Aquinas

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.

--Plato

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

--Charles Bukowski

Most people will not stand up to injustice unless their comfort of living is severely threatened. This is because today's man does not care for the outside world so long as he has a roof over his head and four walls to contain his own.

--Suzy Kassem

It would be easy to become a victim of our circumstances and continue feeling sad, scared or angry; or instead, we could choose to deal with injustice humanely and break the chains of negative thoughts and energies, and not let ourselves sink into it.

--Erin Gruwell

Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.

--Che Guevara

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

--Howard Zinn

Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.

--Aristotle
woman in dress holding sword figurine

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