Justice Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Edmund Burke
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| Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness. |
| - Henri Frédéric Amiel |
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| Poverty is the mother of crime. |
| - Marcus Aurelius Antoninus |
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| It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered. |
| - Aristotle |
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| The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want. |
| - Aristotle |
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| It's strange that men should take up crime when there are so many legal ways to be dishonest. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught. |
| - Honoré de Balzac |
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| But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. |
| - Frederic Bastiat |
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| Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage. |
| - Ambrose Bierce |
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| The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes. |
| - Lady Marguerite Blessington |
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| In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. |
| - Lenny Bruce |
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| Hunger makes a thief of any man. |
| - Pearl S. Buck |
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| The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them. |
| - Lois McMaster Bujold |
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| Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. |
| - Edmund Burke |
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| It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery. |
| - Edmund Burke |
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| It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. |
| - Edmund Burke |
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| Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised. |
| - Edward Dahlberg |
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| There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court. |
| - Clarence Darrow |
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| An appeal... is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court. |
| - Finley Peter Dunne |
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| Justice is a contract of expediency, entered upon to prevent men harming or being harmed. |
| - Epicurus |
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| Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty. |
| - Henry Ford |
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| The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. |
| - Anatole France |
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| A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| The more laws the more offenders. |
| - Thomas Fuller |
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| Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society. |
| - Emma Goldman |
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| The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation. |
| - Emma Goldman |
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| It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it. |
| - Rémy de Gourmont |
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| Law is not justice and a trial is not a scientific inquiry into truth. A trial is the resolution of a dispute. |
| - Edison Haines |
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| If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers in the first place. |
| - Lord Halifax |
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| Justice does not come from the outside. It comes from inner peace. |
| - Barbara Hall |
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| Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries. |
| - S.I. Hayakawa |
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| If it were not for injustice, men would not know justice. |
| - Heraclitus |
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| Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished. |
| - William ernest Hocking |
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| The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. |
| - Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes |
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| This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice. |
| - Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes |
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| The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known. |
| - Charles Evans Hughes |
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| Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort - as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails. |
| - Robert Greene Ingersoll |
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| Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. Why not punish a man for having consumption? The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical. What do you do with the criminal? You send him to the penitentiary. Is he made better? Worse. The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him. You mark him. You put him in stripes. At night you put him in darkness. His feeling for revenge grows. You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to. |
| - Robert Greene Ingersoll |
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| Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master. |
| - Jesse Jackson |
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| Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. |
| - Martin Luther, Jr. King |
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| Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws. |
| - Walter Savage Landor |
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| I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. |
| - Abraham Lincoln |
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| Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. |
| - Groucho Marx |
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| Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| Judge: a law student who marks his own papers. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have. |
| - Michel de Montaigne |
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| Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion. |
| - Wendell Phillips |
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| Corn can't expect justice from a court composed of chickens. |
| - African Proverb |
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| The houses of lawyers are roofed with the skins of litigants. |
| - Welsh Proverb |
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| We don't give our criminals much punishment, but we sure give 'em plenty of publicity. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business? |
| - Will Rogers |
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| Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong. |
| - Theodore Roosevelt |
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| Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate. |
| - Bertrand Russell |
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| Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. |
| - Jonathan Swift |
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| Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility. |
| - Thomas Szasz |
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| Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends. |
| - J.R.R. Tolkien |
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| The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits. |
| - Leo Tolstoy |
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| The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. |
| - Lao Tzu |
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| A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. |
| - Bill Vaughan |
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| It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any. |
| - Mae West |
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| As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
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| One of irony's greatest accomplishments is that one cannot punish the wrongdoing of another without committing a wrongdoing himself. |
| - Tas Soft Wind |
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| Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it. |
| - Malcolm X |
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| The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. |
| - Frank Zappa |
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