quotations about justice
Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.
ANATOLE FRANCE
Crainquebille
If Justice is pictured blindfold, it is because she judges causes, not men, and not because the prime faculty of an arbitrator is lack of discernment.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together. Wherever her temple stands, and so long as it is duly honored, there is a foundation for general security, general happiness, and the improvement and progress of our race.
DANIEL WEBSTER
speech, Sep. 12, 1845
Justice is the great end of civil society.
DAVID DUDLEY FIELD
speech, Mar. 1885
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
H. L. MENCKEN
Prejudices
There is a certain attitude of mind that underlies the theory of justice and that ought to be strengthened by the experience of complex equality: we can think of it as a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Not the opinions of this or that individual, which may well deserve a brusque response: I mean those deeper opinions that are the reflections in individual minds, shaped also by individual thought, of the social meanings that constitute our common life. For us, and for the foreseeable future, these opinions make for autonomous distributions; and every form of dominance is therefore an act of disrespect. To argue against dominance and its accompanying inequalities, it is only necessary to attend to the goods at stake and to the shared understanding of these goods. When philosophers do this, when they write out of respect for the understandings they share with their fellow citizens, they pursue justice justly, and they reinforce the common pursuit.
MICHAEL WALZER
Spheres of Justice
The golden eye of justice sees, and requites the unjust man.
SOPHOCLES
fragment, Ajax the Locrian
Justice like the sunflower hangs its head on the sunny side.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Justice is the fundamental virtue of political society, since the order of society cannot be maintained without law, and laws are instituted to declare what is just.
ARISTOTLE, Politics
Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Dec. 5, 1955
Justice required resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
As nothing is straighter than that which is straight, so nothing is juster than that which is just.
EPICTETUS
Fragments
Justice ... limps along, but it gets there all the same.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
In Evil Hour
Justice is that system of adjusting conflicting interests which makes the group strong and progressive rather than weak and retrogressive whereas injustice is a system of adjusting conflicting interests which makes a nation weak and retrogressive rather than strong and progressive.
THOMAS NIXON CARVER
Essays in Social Justice
Respect the altar of Justice and do not, looking to profit, dishonor it by spurning with godless foot; for punishment will come upon you.
AESCHYLUS
The Eumenides
There is evil poured upon the earth from the overflowings of corruption--
Sickness, and poverty, and pain, and guilt, and madness, and sorrow;
But, as the water from a fountain riseth and sinketh to its level,
Ceaselessly toileth justice to equalize the lots of men.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Justice is never so slender to us as when we first practice it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The safety of the people requireth further from him or them that have the sovereign power, that justice be equally administered to all degrees of people, that is, that as well the rich and mighty as poor and obscure persons may be righted of the injuries done them, so as the great may have no greater hope of impunity when they do violence, dishonor, or any injury to the meaner sort than when one of these does the like to one of them. For in this consisteth equity, to which, as being a precept of the law of Nature, a sovereign is as much subject as any of the meanest of his people.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
I'm not so foolish as to think truth and justice must inevitably triumph simply because they deserve to, but liars ultimately destroy the things they lie to protect, and corruption, ambition, and betrayal inevitably betray themselves, as well.
DAVID WEBER
By Schism Rent Asunder
Justice without wisdom is impossible.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects