Top 100 Human Justice Quotes
#1. All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.
P.D. James
#2. Nothing do I know of the law at all. But I do remember that the Bible likens human justice to a woman's unclean rag - quasi pannus menstruate - and I have little faith in truth as an immediate safeguard, in this world.
Patrick O'Brian
#3. An infinite number of men will sell publicly and unhindered things of the very highest price, without leave from the Master of it; while it never was theirs nor in their power; and human justice will not prevent it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#4. As for the law of moral causation ('karma'): this is human justice dressed up as cosmic justice and then imputed to the impersonal workings of the natural world.
Stephen Batchelor
#5. He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me.
Albert Camus
#6. Absolute justice demands that mens incomes and rewards should ... vary, and that some have more than others-so long as human justice is upheld by the provision of equal opportunity for all.
Sayyid Qutb
#7. In the heart of every lawyer, worthy of the name, there burns a deep ambition so to bear himself that the profession may be stronger by reason of his passage through its ranks, and that he may leave the law itself a better instrument of human justice than he found it.
John W. Davis
#8. If human justice is to supplement Nature's provisions, all family duties must be shared equitably, in person or by proxy.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
#9. Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.
Soren Kierkegaard
#10. My conscience is clear, because I know that in my conscience and in front of God I am guilty of nothing. I hope human justice will see at the same way.
Giulio Andreotti
#11. That is what Reason can neither grasp nor endure, and what has offended all these men of outstanding talent who have been so received for so many centuries. Here they demand that God should act according to human justice, and do what seems right to them or else cease to be God.
Martin Luther
#12. Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
Nelson Mandela
#13. Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.
Carl Jung
#14. A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious ... When conducted with magnanimity, justice and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.
Alexander Hamilton
#15. I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being.
Charles Kingsley
#16. Who is this vague "they" we blame for so many of our problems? "They" is the obscure party we use as our whipping boy to camouflage the fact that we - you and I and other specific human beings just like us - have to start doing things differently. "They" can't fix anything. We can.
Price Pritchett
#17. Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice, as we look hereafter to have justice administered to ourselves.
Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine
#18. No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics.
Franz Boas
#19. His Holiness brings a wealth of experience to this exalted office. The United Nations and the Holy See share a strong commitment to peace, social justice, human dignity, religious freedom and mutual respect among the world's religions.
Kofi Annan
#20. No human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice.
John Ruskin
#21. The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use."
~Louis D. Brandeis
Louis D. Brandeis
#22. Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.
Mortimer Adler
#23. The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race: that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#24. God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity.
Peter Kreeft
#25. One doesn't expect justice from life ... it's the function of human beings to put it there ...
Gwethalyn Graham
#26. It is, in fact, a great mistake to think we must suppress observations of human differences if we are to do justice to human dignity. The dignity of the person is not touched by such observations, for the dignity of human beings as persons is not an object of observation but of recognition.
Robert Spaemann
#27. Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
Alexander Hamilton
#28. 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
#29. Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry
#30. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People
Yuval Noah Harari
#31. We have a duty to look after each other. If we lose control of our government, then we lose our ability to dispense justice and human kindness. Our first priority today, then, is to defeat utterly those forces of greed and corruption that have come between us and our self-governance.
Doris "Granny D" Haddock
#32. The E.U. is more than just a trade organization or a common market; it is a guarantee of democracy, freedom, justice, and human rights. Nations cannot stay in the E.U. if they do not respect these guarantees.
John Bruton
#33. The world has lost a visionary leader, a courageous voice for justice, and a clear moral compass. By showing us that the path to freedom and human dignity lies in love, wisdom and compassion for one another, Nelson Mandela stands as an inspiration to us all.
Kofi Annan
#34. What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.
Margaret Mead
#35. Justice' primes the human habitat for peaceful and friendly togetherness. It sets the table - the round table - for polylogue and negotiations guided by the will of agreement. Justice is the most 'socializing' of values.
Zygmunt Bauman
#36. I have spent all my life advocating on behalf of the poor, oppressed and marginalized. As a social justice and human rights activist, and now as President of the Republic of Malawi, I have a deep appreciation for the challenges of those on the margins of society.
Joyce Banda
#37. It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. If they did so, they couldn't be reelected.
Jimmy Carter
#38. But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation-liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves.
Hillary Clinton
#39. No one has a human right to hide from justice behind a veil.
Melanie Phillips
#40. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#41. War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
Norman Cousins
#42. A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
H.G.Wells
#43. Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Isaiah Berlin
#44. Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.
Robert Kennedy
#45. Soon the day will come when science will win victory over error, justice a victory over injustice, and human love a victory over human hatred and ignorance.
Magnus Hirschfeld
#46. If we bring about that women seek to gain the rights of independence, to increase their sphere of responsibilities, and to incline toward studies, then human abilities will increase daily.
Kang Youwei
#47. It is not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in the making of the civilized world - a more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered.
Ida Tarbell
#48. A perception of this truth lies at the back of the universal human feeling that bad men ought to suffer. It is no use turning up our noses at this feeling, as if it were wholly base. On its mildest level it appeals to everyone's sense of justice. Once
C.S. Lewis
#49. Why should anyone think a white skin superior in evaluating the qualities of human life? I did not really admire a white skin so much myself. Did I not prefer the brown skin that came with exposure to the sun?
Charles Lindbergh
#50. The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.
Ken MacLeod
#51. We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
Nancy Gibbs
#52. Men give us most rarely that which we really want, not favor, but - Justice. Nothing is easier than to coax them to pet us like children, nothing more difficult than to persuade them to treat us like responsible human beings.
Frances Power Cobbe
#53. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.
Nelson Mandela
#54. A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men ... It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience.
Katha Pollitt
#55. From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person.
Nicolas Sarkozy
#56. The need for justice grows out of the conflict of human interests. That is to say, if there were no conflict of interests among mankind we should never have invented the word justice, nor conceived the idea for which it stands.
Thomas Nixon Carver
#57. Human progress planned as alternatives (to God's plan) introduce in justice, evil and violence rising against the divine plan of justice and salvation. And despite transitory and apparent successes, they are reduced to simple machinations destined to dissolution and failure.
Pope John Paul II
#58. I was raised in a family where we were taught that the best thing you could do with your life was to really kind of push the cause of progress and justice and human rights forward.
Benjamin Jealous
#59. When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
Simone De Beauvoir
#60. The conservative thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.
Russell Kirk
#61. Democracy is the absolute value that makes for human dignity, as well as the only road to sustained economic development and social justice.
Kim Dae-jung
#62. We have been warned by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself ... There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#63. If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.
Miguel Ruiz
#64. I believe [ ... ] that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
Neil Gaiman
#65. Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away.
John Goodwin
#66. Justice is not a flexible tool. Unless we all do our part to ensure that justice is applied equally to all human beings, we are a party to its abuse. We must stand together to protect the rights of others.
Leonard Peltier
#67. 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.
Thucydides
#68. If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
#69. We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black and white.
Desmond Tutu
#70. I know that it is likely that as worship of the gods declines, faith between men and all human society will disappear, as well as that most excellent of all virtues, which is justice.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#71. For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family.
Bertrand Russell
#72. You sit up there, and you see the whole gamut of human nature. Even if the case being argued involves only a little fellow and $50, it involves justice. That's what is important.
Earl Warren
#73. For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.
Thucydides
#74. A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table, but above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness and respect for every human being.
Pope Francis
#75. Human history is one prolonged and painful limping. We invariably step with one foot on the rock of justice, and with the other, we sink into the mire of deceit and self-delusion.
Danail Hristov
#76. Revolution is about the need to re-evolve political, economic and social justice and power back into the hands of the people, preferably through legislation and policies that make human sense. That's what revolution is about. Revolution is not about shootouts.
Bobby Seale
#77. Congress, even with its frustrations, is the greatest instrument for justice and human welfare in the world.
Rush D. Holt Jr.
#78. For men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice.
Victor Hugo
#79. People who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.
Howard Zinn
#80. Over the last eight years of being on YouTube, I've seen so much progress. I think the reason for that is that a lot of young people are having open dialogue and honest conversations about social justice and human rights.
Tyler Oakley
#81. The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws.
Ben Whishaw
#82. By anarchist spirit I mean that deeply human sentiment, which aims at the good of all, freedom and justice for all, solidarity and love among the people; which is not an exclusive characteristic only of self-declared anarchists, but inspires all people who have a generous heart and an open mind.
Errico Malatesta
#83. Religions have become a hindrance, rather than a help, to our shared pursuit of peace and progress. They tend to make us meaner rather than better human beings, less sensitive to the demands of justice, compassion and fellow humanity in our times.
Agnivesh
#84. I don't believe in any form of unjustified extremism! But when a man is exercising extremism
a human being is exercising extremism
in defense of liberty for human beings it's no vice, and when one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings I say he is a sinner.
Malcolm X
#86. Governments never do any great good things from mere principle, from mere love of justice ... You expect too much of human nature when you expect that.
Susan B. Anthony
#87. Did the dead still want things? Or was death simply a letting go of all that is held so tightly in life - an understanding of the temporal and shallow nature of the human matters of possession, greed, desire, justice?
Lisa Wingate
#88. How protean are the devices available to human intelligence when it lends itself to the persistence of the conformist error.
Robert M. Lindner
#89. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance ...
William Landay
#90. The kosmos works by harmony of tensions, like lyre and bow. Good and evil are one. On the one hand God sees all as well, fair, and good; on the other hand a human being sees injustice here, justice there. Justice in our minds is strife. We cannot help but see war makes us as we are.
Heraclitus
#91. Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if only you pull it in the right way.
Wilkie Collins
#92. What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
Jamaica Kincaid
#93. I find it deeply upsetting when I see justice not being served. How do we as human beings deal with the unknown? The West Memphis Three trial is a joke on so many different levels.
Atom Egoyan
#94. Legal procedure has always tacitly been concerned with human relations, rather than abstract justice, and that consequently in spite of the legal codes it is really the human relations underneath that determine the verdicts in the courts.
James Jones
#95. Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.
John Buchan
#96. The search for justice and security, the struggle for equality of opportunity, the quest for tolerance and harmony, the pursuit of human dignity - these are moral imperatives which we must work towards and think about on a daily basis.
Aga Khan IV
#97. The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress. It's coexistence or no existence.
Bertrand Russell
#98. So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being?"
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#99. I believe in justice and truth, without which there would be no basis for human hope
Dalai Lama
