3,189 Quotes About Justice

Forms of punishment that do not include the human reckoning of accountability and the human grappling of remorse rely exclusively on extrinsic motivation— a threat from outside. One of the effects of accountability is to help foster people’s intrinsic motivation, which manifests in part as remorse.

Fighting cruelty with just criticism is like fighting against sword with a stick.

A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!

For the hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people who live outside the protection of the rule of law, they principal reason they suffer abuse is often not the absence of good laws, but the absence of a functioning public justice system to enforce those laws.

A true friend does not make you win by making you the winner to the detriment of the true winner. He makes sure that you become a loser, not because he likes the way you fail, but to enlighten you on how it feels to be treated that way and to demonstrate that love and respect are not exclusive.

You can't always expect people to apply your wisdom when they didn't use wisdom before they found themselves knee deep in their version of justice.

Likewise, however little man, in living, demands as just to himself, his duty toward justice remains infinite. The right to live cannot be paid by finite labour, only by infinite activity. Because you participate in the violence of all things, all of this violence is part of your debt to justice. All of your activity must go toward eradicating this: to give everything and demand nothing; this is the duty—where duties and rights may be, I do not know.

I have joyfully done much evil in my life to those who have wished me evil (General Maximus)

If our social justice is guided by retribution, we will simply perpetuate the use and abuse of power to inflict violence.