“Mankind has always argued about justice and injustice, while social scientists and politicians have endlessly discussed the conditions which make justice more or less attainable. These essays discuss a more philosophical issue-what justice is and why it matters. Although their authors were philosophers, few of them were 'professional ' philosophers…”

Justice (1993)

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Alan Ryan20

British philosopher 1940

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 59

“Obama shared in the more philosophical part of the discussion as vigorously as he did in the more context-oriented part …. The impression you report, of impatience with speculative exploration, is false. It does justice neither to him nor to me to represent these conversations under the lens of philistine activist against starry-eyed theoretician. He was always interested in ideas, big and small.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185 (explaining the nature of Obama's participation in the two seminars that Obama took with Unger while studying at Harvard Law School)
On Barack Obama

“Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.”

Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) Austrian zoologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973.

“I have always held that social justice, even to the least the lowliest, is impossible of attainment by force.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Harijan (20 April 1940) p. 97
1940s

“I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Preface to Second Edition (1843)
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

“A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

“First, then, God, being all-just, wishes to do justice; being all-wise, knows what justice is; being all-powerful, can do justice. Why then injustice?”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

The Economic Tendency of Freethought (1890)
Context: First, then, God, being all-just, wishes to do justice; being all-wise, knows what justice is; being all-powerful, can do justice. Why then injustice? Either your God can do justice and won't or doesn't know what justice is, or he cannot do it. The immediate reply is: "What appears to be injustice in our eyes, in the sight of omniscience may be justice. God's ways are not our ways."
Oh, but if he is the all-wise pattern, they should be; what is good enough for God ought to be good enough for man; but what is too mean for man won't do in a God.

“Justice, n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

“To despise riches may, indeed, be philosophic; but to dispense them worthily must, surely, be more beneficial to mankind.”

Frances Burney book Evelina

Letter XXVII
Evelina (1778)

“They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

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Alan Ryan20

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