Justice and Equality
Abraham Lincoln
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
George Bernard Shaw
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
[ 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 .
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Haile Selassie
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.
Haile Selassie
Outside the Kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than another. God and history will remember your judgment!
Rémy de Gourmont
It is fairly obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
George W. Bush
Surely a tired woman on her way to work at six in the morning on a subway deserves the right to get there safely.
J.R.R. Tolkien
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.