Justice quotes
3.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside justice — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"A man’s life may stagnate as literally as water may stagnate, and just as motion and direction are the remedy for one, so purpose and activity are the remedy for the other."
"Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality. That is that entire universe is made of matter, obviously. And matter is made of particles. It's made of electrons and neutrons and protons. So the entire universe is made out of particles. Now what are the particles made out of They're not made out of anything. The only thing you can say about the reality of an electron is to cite its mathematical properties. So there's a sense in which matter has completely dissolved and what is left is just a mathematical structure."
"Without justice, there can be no peace."
"All life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."
"I am funny, but I'm not about funny... I'm about peace & justice."
"Not to help justice in her need would be an impiety."
"All the words that George Bush used in public during the early stages of the crisis - "wanted, dead or alive," "a crusade," etc. - suggest not so much an orderly and considered progress towards bringing the man to justice according to international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences."
"Punishment - The justice that the guilty deal out to those that are caught."
"Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself"
"Justice does not descend from its own pinnacle."
"A precedent embalms a principle."
"The higher type of man clings to virtue, the lower type of man clings to material comfort. The higher type of man cherishes justice, the lower type of man cherishes the hope of favors to be received."
"Just as lavishness leads easily to presumption, so does frugality to meanness. But meanness is a far less serious fault than presumption."
"If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient."
"The death penalty is used in such a blatantly racist way in the United States. There is no way that can be defended under any kind of definition of justice by anybody."
"As with all great teachers, his curriculum was an insignificant part of what he communicated. From him you didn't learn a subject, but a life...Tolerance and justice, fearlessness and pride, reverence and pity, are learned in a course on long division if the teacher has those qualities."
"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions."
"Nothing is to be preferred before justice."
"Think on this doctrine, - that reasoning beings were created for one another's sake; that to be patient is a branch of justice, and that men sin without intending it."
"The world more often rewards the appearances of merit than merit itself."
