Justice and Equality

In a slave state, the slaves rule: in Mayfair, the tradesman rules.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.

Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.

Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

Our inheritance of well founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries can bestow.

Justice is being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

Justice while she winks at crimes, stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Race is a fraud. All modern people are a conglomeration of so many ethnic mixtures that no pure race remains.

When one looks at humankind today, one notices with regret that quantity does not make up for quality. If quantity could only substitute for quality, we would be in better circumstances now than was Ancient Greece.

It is unworthy of a great nation to stand idly by while small countries of great culture are being destroyed with a cynical contempt for justice.

The Nuremberg Trial of the German war criminals was tacitly based on the recognition of the principle: Criminal actions cannot be excused if committed on government orders; conscience supersedes the authority of the law of the state.

As long as I have any choice, I will stay only in a country where political liberty, toleration, and equality of all citizens before the law are the rule.

Judges must follow their oaths and do their duty, heedless of editorials, letters, telegrams, threats, petitions, panellists and talk shows.

One to destroy, is murder by the law;

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.