Quotes about justice

There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.

If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.

For Einstein, as for most people, a belief in something larger than himself became a defining sentiment. It produced in him an admixture of confidence and humility that was leavened by a sweet simplicity. Given his proclivity toward being self-centered, these were welcome graces. Along with his humor and self-awareness, they helped him to avoid the pretense and pomposity that could have afflicted the most famous mind in the world.

His religious feelings of awe and humidity also informed his sense of social justice. It impelled him to cringe at trappings of hierarchy or class distinction, to eschew excess consumption and materialism, and to dedicate himself to efforts on behalf of refugees and the oppressed.

'''No, it's not fair. You're in the wrong universe for fair.

To close the gap between jurisprudence and justice would require a canon of a hundred million laws.

‘Blow wise to this, friend,’ he advised Dove, ‘it's always easier to convict a man of something he didn't do than it is to prove that what he actually was doing was a crime. That's why the nabbers are so much tougher on the man without a record than they are on the finished criminal product. They've got the finished product solved, they can nab him any time, so they can afford to be friendly. It's the bird who pops up on some corner they never seen him around there before, he claims he never been arrested, he got no needle marks, he don't act like a thief and they can't find a set of prints on him that worries them. They figure he must be some too-wise ghee. They got to find a crime to fit him. And if he's innocent that takes persuasion.’

“What happened wasn’t fair!”

“Fair? You mean to claim with a straight face that you buy into that heresy, my boy?”

Once the right of the people to see justice being done is eroded, it is not long before there is no justice at all.

Steal a loaf of bread and they hang you, steal a land and they'll make you king.

Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.

It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.

Just as the American colonials' consciousness expanded from rebelling against unfair taxation in the 1760s to wide noble revolutionary goals touching on the inherent rights of mankind, so the Whiskey Rebellion guerrillas took on broader themes as injustice increasingly framed their consciousness. Once you start seeing injustice in one place, it's like taking off blinders- you start to see injustice everywhere, and how it is all connected.