“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” ——Groucho Marx, American comedian, actor and singer, 1890-1977
“If, while there is yet time, we turn to Justice and obey her, if we trust Liberty and follow her, the dangers that now threaten must disappear, the forces that now menace will turn to agencies of elevation. Think of the powers now wasted; of the infinite fields of knowledge yet to be explored; of the possibilities of which the wondrous inventions of this century give us but a hint with want destroyed, with greed changed to noble passions, with the fraternity that is born of equality taking the place of the jealousy and fear that now array men against each other, with mental power loosened by conditions which give to the humblest comfort and leisure; who shall measure the heights to which our civilization may soar?” ——Henry George (1839-1897)
“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?” ——St. Augustine
“Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.” ——Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950
“Iniquity, committed in this world, produces not fruit immediately, but, like the earth, in due season, and advancing by little and little, it eradicates the man who committed it. Justice, being destroyed, will destroy; being preserved, will preserve; it must never therefore be violated.” ——Manu, 1200 BC
“I will be harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.” ——William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879)
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” ——Martin Luther King, Jr.
“It is reasonable that every one who asks justice should do justice.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“It is sheer folly to expect justice from the unprincipled.” ——Proverb
“Much law, but little justice.” ——Proverb
“Where might is master, justice is servant.” ——Proverb
“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.” ——Edmund Burke
“Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.” ——Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, 14 March 1785
“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.” ——Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“Kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.” ——Bruce “Utah” Phillips, songwriter, storyteller, humorist, philosopher, 1935
“Maybe the greatest sin is neither of these two ancient ones [the lust for power and hubris]; the greatest sin may be the new twentieth-century sin of indifference.” ——Peter Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander, John Wiley and Sons, 1994
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” ——Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” ——Eleanor Roosevelt
“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?” ——Kahlil Gibran
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.” ——Edmund Burke
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” ——Martin Luther King Jr.
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” ——Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?” ——Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), American playwright and memoirist
“Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they’re part of the crime.” ——Olavo de Cavarlho
“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash, your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them.” ——William Faulkner
“Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you, try the following experiment: Recall the face of the poorest and most helpless person you have ever seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be for any use to him or to her … Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.” ——Mohandas Gandhi
“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.” ——Bess Myerson
“We allow the most atrocious lies uttered by political and moral prostitutes to go unchallenged. These lies are endlessly recycled in the commercial media until they become ingrained in the public conscience as truth. Worse than burying our heads in the sand, we bury them up our collective ass. How do you like the view?” ——Charles Sullivan
“The more laws, the less justice.” ——Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
“The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” ——Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963
“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” ——Albert Einstein
“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” ——Winston Churchill
“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.” ——Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia
“Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth.” ——Eugene V. Debs, Speech, June 16, 1918
“Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all?” ——Samuel Adams (1722-1803), known as the ‘Father of the American Revolution’
“When they came for the Branch Davidians, we did not say anything because we were not Branch Davidians.” ——Doug Newman
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” ——Frederick Douglass
“No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.” ——Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th US President
“Do not expect justice where might is right.” ——Plato (429-347 BC), Phaedrus, 360 B.C.
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“God is more interested in showing us His mercy and forgiveness that He is in reprimanding and judging us for our past failures.” ——Author Unknown
“For most men the love of justice is only the fear of suffering injustice.” ——Francois VI Duc de La Rochefoucauld
“Justice doesn’t have scales, it has a heart.” ——Tom Feeley
“He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.” ——Aquinas
“One of the things you learn early in life is that there’s only one thing really worth having, and that’s love. Well, by the same token, there’s only one thing worth fighting for, and that is justice.” ——Tom Clancy, The Bear and the Dragon
“Without justice even mercy becomes a hollow mockery.” ——Adela Rogers St. Johns, Final Verdict
“There can be no beauty if it paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.” ——Tadeusz Borowski
“I could not fail to see, moreover, that, after all, each one of us was largely a creature of circumstance-that what we were, and what we did, was more or less the result of our temperaments, of our inherited characteristics, of our social surroundings and of our education; and that, as these were all providentially arranged for us, with often no power on our part to alter them, it would not be just of the God who had placed us in their midst, to let them determine our eternal destiny.” ——Hannah Whitall Smith
“Unforgiveness is like drinking poison, and waiting for the other person to die.” ——Author Unknown