Justice and Equality

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[ 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.

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligenceand honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity, and perjury.

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!

There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no justice.

Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from ourGovernment a fair deal.

If men were equal to-morrow and all wore thesame coats, they would wear different coats thenext day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements ofthis last convulsion.

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.

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.

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.”

The rich . . . divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants.

[ Question asked by Shaw to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis regarding his wife :] Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?