Quotes on Justice
15. "It Wasn't Just A Puppy."
- John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)
John Wick, Justice
“This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther then by the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he pleases from him.: because using force, where he has no right, to get me into his power, let his pretense be what it will, I have no reason to purpose that he, who would take away my liberty, would not when he had me in his power, take away every thing else. And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him, as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. kill him if I can; for to that hazard does he justly expose himself, whoever introduces a state of war, and is aggressor in it.”
― John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
John Locke, Power, Justice
“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”
Victor Hugo, Kindness, Justice
“Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And that man's feeble attempt to lay down the principles of decency.”
Morgan Freeman, Justice
“Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.”
Che Guevara, Goals, Justice
“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”
Che Guevara, Goals, Justice
“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
Wendell Berry, Nature, Government, Justice
“One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and not be held responsible.
― Margaret Mead, Cultural Factors in the Cause of Pathological Homicide. Bulletin of Menninger Clinic
Margaret Mead, Justice
“A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”
Robert Frost, Justice
“I could peel you like a pear and god himself would see the justice in it.”
Katharine Hepburn, Belief, Justice
“If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice.”
Jane Goodall, Nature, Justice
“How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straightaway... And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!”
Anne Frank, Goals, Justice, Kindness
“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
Helen Keller, Justice, Society
"Same-sex marriage isn’t a gay privilege, it’s equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don’t."
Ricky Gervais, Sex, Justice, Belief
"If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy."
Audre Lorde, Justice, Anger and Fighting
"Justice demands integrity."
bell hooks, Justice
"If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice."
bell hooks, Justice
"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
James Baldwin, Intelligence/Wisdom, Power, Justice
"Take off your hat,” the King said to the Hatter.
“It isn’t mine,” said the Hatter.
“Stolen!” the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made a memorandum of the fact.
“I keep them to sell,” the Hatter added as an explanation; “I’ve none of my own. I’m a hatter."
Alice in Wonderland, Justice
"Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.”
Everybody looked at Alice.
“I’m not a mile high,” said Alice.
“You are,” said the King.
“Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.
“Well, I sha’n’t go, at any rate,” said Alice; “besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.”
“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.
“Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice."
Alice in Wonderland, Justice
"No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards."
Alice in Wonderland, Justice
"I just removed my father's trial to a higher court, and brought him off to Canada."
Harriet Tubman, Justice
"I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart."
I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion."
Frederick Douglass, Freedom, Justice, Happiness, Music
"a woman should have every honorable motive to exertion which is enjoyed by man, to the full extent of her capacities and endowments. The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence."
Frederick Douglass, Justice
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of the slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others."
Frederick Douglass, Justice, Belief
"The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied it's privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of it's humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?"
Frederick Douglass, Justice, Belief
"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."
Frederick Douglass, Freedom, Justice, Society
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass, Justice, Power
"The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery."
Frederick Douglass, Justice
"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, Justice, Society
"No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!"
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men's rights are nothing more. Women's rights are nothing less."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government: the ballot."
Susan B Anthony, Justice, Freedom
"Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"Here, in this very first paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can 'the consent of the governed' be given if the right to vote be denied?"
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"You would better educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles than to organize a thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less."
Susan B Anthony, Justice
"Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or revenge, and fills up our existence with their power."
John Lewis, Freedom, Love, Justice, Power
"Martin Luther King Jr. said that peace is not the absence of tension, but the presence of justice."
John Lewis, Justice
"We may be anxious to reduce crime, but we should remember that in our system of justice, the presumption of innocence is prime, and the law cannot apply one rule to Joe who is a good man, and another to John, who is a hardened criminal."
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice
"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
Eleanor Roosevelt, Justice
"No punishment, in my opinion, is too great, for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin."
George Washington, Justice, Society
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty."
Thomas Jefferson, Justice
"The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government."
Thomas Jefferson, Justice, Happiness, Government
"Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."
Martin Luther King Jr., Power, Love, Justice
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."