Justice Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

George Washington

Adam Smith

Raymond Chandler

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Saul Alinsky

William J. Brennan, Jr.

Barry Goldwater

You had to play the big scene, he said coldly. Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Raymond Chandler

Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.... The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.

George Washington

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.

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.

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 social security, general happiness and the improvement and progress of our race.

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

Joseph de Maistre

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise, - all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.

Robert Charles Winthrop

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.

Stephen Spender

So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice.

James Weldon Johnson

Every act, every deed of justice and mercy and benevolence, makes heavenly music in Heaven.

I was transfixed with horror, and over me there swept the sudden conviction that that hanging was a mistake — worse, a crime. It was my awakening to one of the most terrible facts of life — that justice and judgment lie often a world apart.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished; the others can only be hurt.

William Ernest Hocking

Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Sonia Sotomayor

Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

The family is a court of justice which never shuts down.

Malcolm de Chazal

In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls

Lawyers [are] operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass.

Jane Bryant Quinn

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

William McIlvanney

And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Oh that my Pow'r to Saving were confin'd:
Why am I forc'd, like Heav'n, against my mind,
To make Examples of another Kind?
Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?
Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!
How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,
Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.