Quotes about justice
page 24

“The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

“There will never be peace and justice until we know justice and peace in our hearts.”

José Cabantan (1957) catholic archbishop

Mindanao Bishop condemns communist guerrilla violence http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Mindanao-Bishop-condemns-communist-guerrilla-violence-31554.html (July 7, 2014)

Peace, Heart

“Justice has a way of not arriving where and when you wish it.”

John Barnes book A Million Open Doors

Part 3, Chapter 2 (p. 203)
A Million Open Doors (1992)

Way

“I forgive the injustice carried out in the name of justice,”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Forgiveness

“Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present.”

James W. Loewen (1942) American historian

Truth, Past, Help

“In my perspective, development is not limited to infrastructural development. Even sociological factors need to be considered. Women empowerment and ensuring gender justice is important.”

Divya S. Iyer (1984) Indian bureaucrat

Quoted in Mathrubhumi https://english.mathrubhumi.com/mobile/news/kerala/collector-divya-s-iyer-envisions-a-women-friendly-pathanamthitta-women-empowerment-pathanamthitta-divya-s-iyer-1.5877873

Women

“We also believe that we cannot truly become free when marginalised Black communities are kept at the margins and are forgotten. We don't believe that there can be a trickle-down social justice. We believe that people on the margins must be brought centre.”

Opal Tometi (1984) Nigerian–American writer, strategist and community organizer

Black Lives Matter Was Always Designed to Be a Global Movement, Vice] (7 July 2020)

People, Communication

“[I]t would be unfortunate if, for all the talk of celebrating differences and diversity, we ultimately came to insist that justice requires sameness.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Not Biology or Culture Alone: Response to El-Hout et al. (2021) (with Lewis G. Halsey; 2021), p. 5

“Charity is system-affirming. It does nothing about the root causes of poverty, criminalization, and racism. It just treats a few of the symptoms selectively. Social justice work is about making it so that no one is poor, homeless, targeted by police, deportable, or exploited.”

Dean Spade (1977) American activist

“Having a Cause” versus Living in a Life Centered in Radical Transformation

“A great many people in this country are worried about law-and-order. And a great many people are worried about justice. But one thing is certain: You cannot have either until you have both.”

Ramsey Clark (1927) United States Marine

As quoted in Attorney General and Rebel With a Cause, Dies at 93, By Douglas Martin, New York Times, (10 April 2021)

People, Law, Country

“The local Catholic Church here, together with other religions present in Thailand, we have sought to offer our contribution encouraging our people to pray, promoting dialogue with everyone, educating to legality and social justice and morality in social and political activity.”

Louis Chamniern Santisukniram (1942) Archbishop of Thailand

Source: “Social injustice and corruption at the root of the crisis”: President of Thai Bishops' Conference tells Fides http://www.fides.org/en/news/26621-ASIA_THAILAND_Social_injustice_and_corruption_at_the_root_of_the_crisis_President_of_Thai_Bishops_Conference_tells_Fides (6 May 2010)

People, Education, Religion

“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

Mitch McConnell (1942) US Senator from Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader

2021, February

Country

“It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Declarations of Independence: Cross-examining American Ideology (HarperCollins, 1990), Ch. 5, p. 105

War, Time

“If you want to truly cover the climate crisis, you must also report on the fundamental issues of time, holistic thinking and justice.”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

Source: 2021, An Open Letter to the Global Media by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate (October 2021)

Thinking, Time

“Social justice warriors who are fond of governing by hashtag like to say that silence is violence. And we know that because it rhymes.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Source: Sen. Chris Coons and Caitlin Flanagan, Natural Immunity, (2021)

Silence

“Christ himself would agitate against them. He would agitate against the plutocrats and hypocrites who tell workers to go down on their knees and get right with God. Christ, the carpenter’s son, would tell them to stand up on their feet and fight for righteousness and justice on earth.”

Mary Harris Jones (1837–1930) Irish-born American labor and community organizer

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

God, Christ, Fight

“Critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Five

“It is good to remember that the administration of justice is only just when it is exercised in conformity with the truth and the moral good.”

Juan Alberto Puiggari (1949) Argentine archbishop

Source: Argentinean bishop condemns mid term abortion, stresses that Church 'cannot remain silent' https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/20011/argentinean-bishop-condemns-mid-term-abortion-stresses-that-church-cannot-remain-silent (17 June 2010)

Truth, Exercises

“For 12 years the people resisted, and those 12 years were not in vain. God takes time but doesn't forget. Today the people have made justice.”

Xiomara Castro (1959) First Lady of Honduras

Xiomara Castro (2021) cited in: " Xiomara Castro poised to become first female president of Honduras https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/29/xiomara-castro-declares-victory-in-honduras-presidential-election" in The Guardian, 29 November 2021.

God, People, Time, Forgetting

“[J]ustification of power must be the central problem. For it is through this problem alone that freedom and equality—or... justice—can be projected into the social and political reality... But to fascism the problem does not even exist except as a ridiculous relic of "Jewish liberalism."”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 15

Problem, Reality, Freedom

“If you cannot afford to do justice speedily and well, you may as well shut up the Exchequer and confess that you have no right to raise taxes for the protection of the subject, for justice is the first and primary end of all government.”

John Russell, 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878) leading Whig and Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister on two occasions

Source: Quoted in George W. E. Russell in Prime Ministers and Some Others, 1918, p. 23

“What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being.”

Lev Shestov (1866–1938) Russian theologian

Source: In Job's Balances: on the sources of the eternal truths, The Conquest of the Self-Evident; Dostoievsky’s Philosophy p. 3

Knowledge, Dead

“Because we are socialists we have felt the deepest blessings of the nation, and because we are nationalists we want to promote socialist justice in a new Germany.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Source: 1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

“A court dedicated to pure justice, one that can overrule the law! They didn’t even have one of those back on old Earth!”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Margarets (2007), Chapter 10, “I Am Wilvia/On B’Yurngrad” (p. 69)

Law

“Let there be freedom from perturbations with respect to the things which come from the external cause; and let there be justice in the things done by virtue of the internal cause, that is, let there be movement and action terminating in this, in social acts, for this is according to thy nature.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book IX, 31

Nature, Freedom

“There are people who seriously think sea rescue activists like me rescue Black lives because we hate white people. Some white people feel personally threatened by the fact that human rights apply to everyone equally. White priviledge needs to end if we want justice, ever.”

Carola Rackete (1988) German merchant navy captain

Source: Twitter https://twitter.com/CaroRackete/status/1276852825432166401 (27 June 2020)

Hate, People, Feeling, Thinking

“Our demand for restraint in foreign policy must be stronger than defense contractor lobbyists. Our demand for criminal justice reform must be stronger than the prison-industrial complex.”

Ro Khanna (1976) U.S. Representative from California

Source: Twitter post https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1078674237311860736 (28 December 2018)

“Chaos delights in creation but swiftly becomes bored with what it creates for it seeks not order or justice or constancy but sensation, entertainment. Sometimes it suits it to create something which you and I would value or find pleasure in. But it is an accident.”

Michael Moorcock book The King of the Swords

Source: Book 2, Chapter 2 “The Castle Built of Blood” (p. 320), Corum, The King of the Swords (1971)

Pleasure

“Everything may exist for a short while—even justice. But the true state of the universe is anarchy. It is the mortal’s tragedy that he can never accept this.”

Michael Moorcock book The Knight of the Swords

Source: Book 3, Chapter 6 “The God Feasters” (p. 139), Corum, The Knight of the Swords (1971)

Universe

“We must stand up for equality, justice and human dignity because it is vital to each and every one of us all – woman, man and child”

Funmi Falana Nigerian lawyer, women's rights activist

Source: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/12/funmi-falana-tells-nigerians-to-defend-their-human-rights/ Funmi Falana speaking during a walk to commemorate the International Human Rights Day

“...Our motto, Brazilian workers, is progress with justice, and development with equality...”

João Goulart (1918–1976) 24th President of Brazil

Source: João Goulart. Discursos Selecionados do Presidente João Goulart, 2010, FUNAG, 978-85-7631-193-5, 82, pt-br http://funag.gov.br/loja/download/641-Discursos_joao_goulart.pdf,

“The Peace and Beauty of any Society is Dependent Upon Justice and Honesty at all Levels.”

Mirza Masroor Ahmad (1950) spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Others

Peace, Beauty, Dependency

“I pray that we all play our respective roles in furthering the cause of humanity and I pray that true peace, based upon justice, is established in all parts of the world.”

Mirza Masroor Ahmad (1950) spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Addresses <br class="br">Source: Muslim leader calls for Media Responsibility in fight against Extremism https://www.pressahmadiyya.com/press-releases/2016/03/muslim-leader-calls-for-media-responsibility-in-fight-against-extremism/, Peace Symposium 19 March 2016

World, Peace, Parting

“British influence... is not exercised to impose an uncongenial foreign system upon a reluctant people. It is a force making for the triumph of the simplest ideas of honesty, humanity, and justice, to the value of which Egyptians are just as much alive as anybody else.”

Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner (1854–1925) British statesman and colonial administrator

Source: England in Egypt (1894 ed.), p. 407

People, Exercises, Idea

“We want peace, justice, that's all. If there's no justice, there's no peace, so we would like to request on behalf of all Kachins, and all people from Myanmar, peace and justice.”

Francis Daw Tang (1946)

Source: Myanmar bishops call for peace and justice in war torn Kachin state https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2018-05/myanmar-bishop-kachin-conflict-peace-justice.html (3 May 2018)

People, Peace

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book II, 5

“Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of 'justice', but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If 'freedom' becomes 'privilege', the workings of political freedom are broken.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Die russische Revolution. Eine kritische Würdigung (1920) p. 109
This contains probably her most famous statement: Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden, translated as "Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters."
Literally: Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently.

Freedom, Dependency

“The models... (I) separated and divided powers; (II) implied limitations of government; (III) settled expectations; (IV) governmental regularity (V) preferred rights; (VI) equal protection; and (VII) structural justice.”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

American Constitutional Law (1978), Approaches to Constituitonal Analysis

“In the Middle East and other parts of the world so many innocent people are still convicted. Justice is trampled, and men and women are killed for their faith. We entrust their lives to Jesus Christ.”

Filipe Neri Ferrão (1953) seventh Roman Catholic Patriarch of the East Indies

Source: Prayer vigil for the release of the Salesian kidnapped in Yemen http://fides.org/en/news/59700-ASIA_INDIA_Prayer_vigil_for_the_release_of_the_Salesian_kidnapped_in_Yemen (23 March 2016)

Women, Men, People, World

“I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Source: "I Quit, I Think" (1991)

Children, People, Secret, Feeling

“I’ve taught public school for 26 years but I just can’t do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn’t hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I’m going to quit, I think. I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Source: "I Quit, I Think" (1991)

World, School, Understanding, Thinking

“I deny that villany is ever necessary. It is impossible that it should ever be necessary for any reasonable creature to violate all the laws of justice, mercy, and truth. No circumstances can make it necessary for a man to burst in sunder all the ties of humanity. It can never be necessary for a rational being to sink himself below a brute. A man can be under no necessity of degrading himself into a wolf. The absurdity of the supposition is so glaring, that one would wonder any one can help seeing it.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Source: 1770s, Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774)

Truth, Law, Wolf, Help

“[T]he main work of life lies in carrying on worthily the great common task of civilization: to play one's due part in the enterprise of feeding some hundreds of millions of men, in seeing that they are protected against violence and fraud, that they have access to justice, and as far as may be to education, that they have some freedom to pursue life and happiness, and are not cut off altogether from the wonders and beauties of the world and the mind of man. To succeed in doing this is civilization: to fail is the defeat of civilization. For civilization is, ultimately, the process whereby a human society in search, as Aristotle puts it, of a "good life for man", gradually overcomes the obstacles, material and other, that stand in its way and makes man increasingly master of his environment.”

Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) Anglo-Australian scholar

1920s, The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929)
Source: "Peace and Strife as Elements in Life: The Ideal of “Unhindered Activity”", pp. 37-38

Life, Men, Happiness, World

“Patriotism means different things to different people. For me it entails citizen solidarity in promoting justice at home and resisting official lies, apologetics, euphemisms, crime and tyranny. Love of country requires a commitment to truth and readiness to counter «fake news » and skewed political «narratives.»”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Internationally, patriotism means averting harm from one’s country by pro-actively seeking dialogue and compromise, so as to contribute to peace and justice – pax et iustitia.
2021

Love, People, Truth, Home

“We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty.”

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) Martiniquais writer, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary

Source: Letter to Roger Tayeb, December 1961, as cited in Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), p. 185.

People

“For the sake of our offspring,
we will keep fighting for the Freedom and Justice as long as we can still breathe.”

Kazeronnie Mak

Freedom, Fight

“But in vitriolic conflicts there is neither appropriateness nor proportion, so the arguments of history and justice become lost in vengeance.”

A. C. Grayling (1949) English philosopher

Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 30, “Anger” (p. 122)

History

“On the best view, justice is fairness.”

A. C. Grayling (1949) English philosopher

Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 26, “Protest” (p. 107)

“I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.”

Bryan Stevenson (1959) American lawyer, social reformer and academic

We need to talk about an injustice https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice|

Thinking, Parting, Country, Wealth

“We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.”

Bryan Stevenson (1959) American lawyer, social reformer and academic

We need to talk about an injustice https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice|

Country, Wealth

“It is time that we acknowledge the legacy of systemic racism in our criminal justice system and work together to eliminate the racial disparities that endure to this day. Doing so serves all Americans.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2022, May 2022 <br class="br">Source: Executive Order on Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety (May 25, 2022) https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/05/25/executive-order-on-advancing-effective-accountable-policing-and-criminal-justice-practices-to-enhance-public-trust-and-public-safety/

Time

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousnes (1960)

Problem

“Forgiveness without justice is capitulation and weakness.”

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (1946) primate of the Russian Orthodox Church

"Распятие Кирилла на кресте" (In Russian. "Crucifixion of Kirill on the cross") https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2022/03/18/raspiatie-kirilla-na-kreste, Novaya Gazeta, 18 March 2022

Forgiveness

“Perhaps then we must begin with such facts as are known to us from individual experience. It is necessary therefore that the person who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and politics generally, should have received a good moral training.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

Bk I, Ch II
The Ethics Of Aristotle (Vol. I)

Study, Chance, Personality, Training

“Because, you see, in our form of justice, we have rightly said that individual should not be made to fight alone. A harm against her, against him, against them is a harm against all of us as a society.”

Kamala Harris (1964) United States Senator from California

2022, June 2022, Remarks by Vice President Harris Announcing the Launch of the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse

Fight

“Justice for all means reproductive justice, gender justice, queer justice. Liberty for all means the all-inclusive freedoms that guarantee every person agency over their own body.”

Michelle Wu (1985) City Councilor in Boston, Massachusetts

24 June 2022 "Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says overturning Roe v. Wade will 'ruin lives'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrmQGDRoWCY

Freedom, Personality

“Justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law. We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the negro.”

Frances Harper (1825–1911) American writer

"We Are All Bound Up Together" Speech (1866)

Law, Soul

“An Emperor is subject to no one but God and Justice.”

Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor (1122–1190) Holy Roman Emperor (1122-1190)

From Julius Wilhelm Zincgref (1591-1645), Apophthegmata (1626), bk. I. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 18th ed. (2012).

God

“Yahweh is Lord of all, even of economics. There is no hint here of a sacred law of supply and demand that operates independently of biblical ethics and the Lordship of Yahweh. The people of God should submit to God, and God demands economic justice among his people.”

Ron Sider (1939–2022) Canadian theologian

Source: Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity (2015), p. 75

God, People, Law

“My employer is a miser
His approach has me nerved
He exports our cash abroad
While pay here is inadequate
And my eviction has been served

I joined the labour movement
To get a better deal
Life to-day is miserable
My dignity they did steal

We have some great leaders
To halt the perpetual darken
In Cork we have Quill
Tipp there’s O’Brien
And in Dublin we’ve Big Jim Larkin

That poor young lad in town
Factory smoke he’s been snortin’
Jolly good thing that in the Dáil
He has our man Bill Norton

My employer was a miser
His approach had me nerved
But thanks to the Knights of Labour
Justice has been served.”

Sean O'Connor

Primary source work
Source: Scrap print from Irish Labour history group

Life

“While fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)
Context: What we principally thought of, was to alter people's opinions; to make them believe according to evidence, and know what was their real interest, which when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one another. While fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings.

Love, Education, Feeling, Selfishness

“The voice of justice must shout loudly for justice itself. It doesn't matter whether he is religious or not religious! It doesn't matter whether he is a minority or a majority!”

Titon Rahmawan

“We may easily criticize or revile the policies of those in power just because we feel that their policies are not in line with our principles. However, we should not build public opinion without considering why the policy was made, for whom and how the policy process was made. Does the policy fulfill the principles and sense of justice? We should be able to see the greater interest rather than only seeing from the side of personal gain, groups or a handful of people.”

Titon Rahmawan

People, Feeling, Sense, Personality

“Governing is not merely about making others submit, obey and carry out orders. Ruling is the art of making choices and giving priority to the greater public interest based on the principles of honesty and justice.”

Titon Rahmawan

Art

“When law and justice have been manipulated by power, then we can no longer accept them as law and justice.”

Titon Rahmawan

Law