Justice Quotes

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Abraham Lincoln, speech in Washington D. C., 1865

There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

Montesquieu, 1742

Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.

Daniel Defoe

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

John Dewey

Rigid justice is the greatest injustice.

Thomas Fulle

Justice is the constant and perpetual will to allot to every man his due.

Domitus Ulpian

Justice will only exist where those not affected by injustice are filled with the same amount of indignation as those offended.

Plato

The more laws, the less justice.

Cicero

Justice does not come from the outside. It comes from inner peace.

Barbara Hall, A Summons to New Orleans, 2000

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Courage is of no value unless accompanied by justice yet if all men became just, there would be no need for courage.

Agesilaus the Second

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

Adlai Stevenson

What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice.

Demosthenes

Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts, and strives without fear to do justice to them.

Berthold Auerbach

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Baruch Spinoza

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

Aristotle

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity, 2002

Through me you pass into the city of woeThrough me you pass into eternal painThrough me among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric movedTo rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save thingsEternal, and eternal I shall endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Dante Alighieri

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Edmund Burke

Those who really deserve praise are the people who, while human enough to enjoy power, nevertheless pay more attention to justice than they are compelled to do by their situation.

Thucyclides

Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in circumstances confronting him.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Richard Bach

Truth is the summit of being justice is the application of it to affairs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.

Brooks Atkinson

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Earl Warren

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

Clarence Darrow