Justice and Equality

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

We enact many laws that manufacturecriminals, and then a few that punish them.

 

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

 

A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

 

[ In response to a well-wisher who called out “Now justice will be administered in Washington” as Holmes embarked to take his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, 1902 :] Don’t be too sure. I am going there to administer the law .

 

The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.

 

The government ought not to use evidence obtained and only obtainable, by a criminal act. . . . For my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the Government should play an ignoble part.

 

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: . . . until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; . . . until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; . . . until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; . . . until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.

 

Outside the Kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than another. God and history will remember your judgment!

 

No justice, no peace.

 

It is fairly obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.

One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the efforts of every man to get the most he can for his services and that of society disguised under the name of capital to get his services for the least possible return.

Surely a tired woman on her way to work at six in the morning on a subway deserves the right to get there safely.

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

The life of the law has not been logic but experience.

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.

 

Heaven will one day open

 

So Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.

 

World history is the world’s court. 2

 

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. 1

 

Foolish men who accuse a woman mindlessly— you cannot even see you cause what you abuse.