Quotes About Justice and Injustice
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!
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.
Law and justice are not always the same.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
Justice is never given; it is exacted.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
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.
If we won't fight injustice wherever we see it, then we are not safe from suffering injustice ourselves.

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.
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.
Justice is the most political and/or institutional of the virtues. The legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice.
It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.
Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.
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.

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.

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.

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.

Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.
Embracing our brokenness creates a need and a desire for mercy and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.
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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
What I seek to accomplish is simply to serve with my feeble capacity truth and justice, at the risk of pleasing no one.

When the Negro cries with pain from his deep hurt and lays his petition for elemental justice before the nation, he is calling upon the American people to kindle about that crucible of race relationships the fires of American faith.

Better still -- your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War.
In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.
Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.
Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured.

Progress is always relative: to the oppressed, it can only be viewed as an all or nothing deal -- if oppression continues, even in a modified form, then the system must still be attacked until that injustice is eradicated.

Now people all across America are starting to believe in America again. We are coming back, back to the heights of greatness, back to America's proud role as a temple of justice and a champion of peace.

In that first blow to the deaf walls of those who have everything, the blood of our people, our blood, ran generously to wash away injustice. To live, we die. Our dead once again walked the way of truth. Our hope was fertilized with mud and blood.
I think the Justice Department needs to be the final protector of the people of the United States of America.
I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.

The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution -- nor by the courts -- nor by the officers of the law -- nor by the lawyers -- but by the men and women who constitute our society -- who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.
What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
The Pledge of Allegiance says, 'liberty and justice for all'.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The Pledge of Allegiance says "...with liberty and justice for all." What part of "all" don't you understand?
Rosa Parks was the queen mother of a movement whose single act of heroism sparked the movement for freedom, justice and equality. Her greatest contribution is that she told us a regular person can make a difference.
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.
This hour we are stretching forth our hands with the desire to teach the world the true principles of mercy and justice.
There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog, and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness.

But for their right to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters of fact; for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence.
There really can be no peace without justice. There can be no justice without truth. And there can be no truth, unless someone rises up to tell you the truth.
True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.
There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

That justice should be administered between men, it is necessary that testimonies of fact be alleged; and that witnesses should apprehend themselves greatly obliged to discover the truth, according to their conscience, in dark and doubtful cases.
I stand for simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights. The indispensable elements in a democratic society -- and well worth fighting for.
My father thought, and now I think too, that the system of democracy is entirely based upon the system of justice. If we do not have a system of justice that people believe in, the system of democracy will fail.
Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.
The American people do not want people thumbing their nose at the law. It undercuts the very fabric of our society and the system of civil justice and of criminal justice as well.
In a system that disproportionately harms poor people and people of color, too many Americans have lost faith in the essential American principle of equal justice under law.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
We know that social exclusion is closely tied to the new economic world order, globalized, with free and open markets, which isn't bringing prosperity or social justice to all.
There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
Finally, let us understand that when we stand together, we will always win. When men and women stand together for justice, we win. When black, white and Hispanic people stand together for justice, we win.
The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.
I pray as follows: May justice reign, may the laws not be broken, may the wise men be poor, and the poor men rich, without sin.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do.
For there is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth, has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight.
Earth's dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation.
