Justice Quotes - Page 155

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable; of a bad one, to make it less valuable.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

The wise fools who sit in the high places of justice fail to see that in revolutionary times vital issues are settled not by statutes, decrees and authorities, but in spite if them.

As soon as you begin to say We have always done things this way -- perhaps that might be a better way, conscious law-making is beginning. As soon as you begin to say We do things this way -- they do things that way -- what is to be done about it? men are beginning to feel towards justice, that resides between the endless jar of right and wrong.

It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.

The world has experienced a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice. At no time in history has there been a more important Conference, or a more necessary meeting, than this one in San Francisco, which you are opening today.

This [minimum wage] legislation, passed by the 81st Congress at its first session, is an important addition to the laws we live by. It is a measure dictated by social justice. It adds to our economic strength. It is founded on the belief that full human dignity requires at least a minimum level of economic sufficiency and security.

The court case against me was a dictate out of the White House. Richard Nixon instructed the Justice Department to prosecute pornography to the fullest extent. Now, at the same time, Watergate was going on, so I think he was trying to defer the press or take attention away from his own personal problems.

I can be pushed just so far.

The United States Justice Department, in my opinion, hasn't done a damn thing to alleviate this horrible manifestation of racism, bigotry and hate against blacks - the first African American President has done nothing. Even if he were inclined to do something to rectify what we are experiencing as a nation, I don't know if can go as far as an artistic expression can go, as salve for the collected suffering of the people.

Frequently you have a clash between the more sterile letter of the law and the justice that underlies it, and I think one of the things I've been trying more or less, where it was possible, is to go with the justice rather than the letter of the law.

Hollywood is in somewhat the same position as Las Vegas these days. It went from being the capital of sin to Disneyland, and now it's landed somewhere in between. It tries to keep the sins hidden away and outwardly present itself as a defender of American virtues: justice, individual freedom, and the power of one innocent soul to save the world.

I guess for me the greatest injustice is to see people robbed of that interiority and process of association.

Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals

One doesn't expect justice from life ... it's the function of human beings to put it there.

At the same time, we can't blame comedians for taking time to learn. Any critic of comedy who believes that he has always, universally, been on the right side of justice is engaging in a hypocrisy that is itself a joke.

The communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrown of overweening cupidity and selfishness which assiduously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wide disorder the citadel of misrule.

One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing for instance. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. So, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change.

Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.

As a writer and as a human being, Susan Dworkin has always had the ability to draw us into new dreams of justice, and to make them irresistibly practical, humorous and human. She makes clear that progress and pleasure go together.

Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten.

Just when you thought multi-nationals and crazed consumerism were too big to fight, along comes Naomi Klein with facts, spirit, and news of successful fighters already out there. No Logo is an invigorating call to arms for everybody who wants to save money, justice, or the universe.