Justice and Equality
Richard Wright
Goddamit, look! We live here and they livethere. We black and they white. They got thingsand we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail.
Oscar Wilde
It is indeed a burning shame that thereshould be one law for men and another law for women. . . . I think that there should be no law for anybody.
Simone Weil
The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either toreasons of state, or to any consideration ofmoney, nationality, race, or color, or to themoral or other value attributed to the humanbeing in question, or to any considerationwhatsoever.
Alice Walker
The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give thewhite man nothing else. But the fact is, you gotto give ’em something. Either your money, your land, your woman, or your ass.
Voltaire
That generous maxim, that it is much moreprudence to acquit two persons, though actually guilty, than to pass sentence of condemnationon one that is virtuous and innocent.
Voltaire
If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there weretwo, they would cut each other’s throats; butthere are thirty, and they live happily togetherin peace.
Mark Twain
Here I was, in a country where a right tosay how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. . . . I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.
Mark Twain
[ On women in the United States :] They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them.
Mark Twain
The jury system puts a ban upon intelligenceand honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity, and perjury.
Mark Twain
When the peremptory challenges wereall exhausted, a jury of twelve men wereimpaneled—a jury who swore that they hadneither heard, read, talked about, nor expressedan opinion concerning a murder which thevery cattle in the corrals, the Indians in thesage-brush, and the stones in the street werecognizant of!
Desmond Tutu
There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no justice.
Harry S. Truman
Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from ourGovernment a fair deal.
Anthony Trollope
If men were equal to-morrow and all wore thesame coats, they would wear different coats thenext day.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I believe that [in the United States] the socialchanges that bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and, in general, superiors and inferiors will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The jury . . . may be regarded as a gratuitous public school, ever open, in which every juror learns to exercise his rights, enters into daily communication with the most learned and enlightened members of the upper classes, and becomes practically acquainted with the laws of his country.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The more we reflect upon all that occursin the United States, the more shall we be persuaded that the lawyers as a body, form the most powerful, if not the only counterpoise to the democratic element. In that country we perceive how eminently the legal profession is qualified by its powers, and even by its defects, to neutralize the vices which are inherent in popular government.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I cannot believe that a republic could subsist at the present time, if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements ofthis last convulsion.
Baruch Spinoza
To bring aid to everyone in need far surpasses the powers and advantage of a private person. . . . So the case of the poor falls upon society as a whole.
Herbert Spencer
The law is the survival of the fittest . . . . The law is not the survival of the “better” or the “stronger,” if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.
Thomas Sowell
Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, “social justice.”