Quotes About Justice And Power

#1. 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

#2. Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

Blaise Pascal

#3. Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#4. Let us rise in the moral power of womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy, and insulted justice, and eternal truth, and mighty love and holy freedom.

Maria Weston Chapman

#5. When we lose faith in our officers of the law, it harms all of as. It cripples our criminal justice system. It threatens the most vulnerable parts of our community. It allows money and power to subvert justice.

Rob Thomas

#6. The object of civil society is justice, not truth, virtue, wealth, knowledge, glory or power. Justice is followed by equality and liberty.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

#7. Legislators and judges are necessarily exposed to all the temptations of money, fame, and power, to induce them to disregard justice between parties, and sell the rights, and violate the liberties of the people. Jurors, on the other hand, are exposed to none of these temptations.

Lysander Spooner

#8. Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

Khalil Gibran

#9. Jimmy Meng sought to be a power broker in the halls of justice. But the influence he sought to peddle was corrupt, and his power was illusory.

Loretta Lynch

#10. When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.

Mary Doria Russell

#11. Adversity has its compensations, that in falling, and in failing, we rise. It is as if there is a hand behind us that sets to right all imbalances. Why do you think the saints seldom had the temporal power that we mistakenly identify with the fruits of justice? Do you think they needed it, or cared?

Mark Helprin

#12. One must obey the man whom the city sets up in power in small things and in justice and in its opposite.

Sophocles

#13. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#14. But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

Howard Zinn

#15. The act of claiming an identity can be transformational. It can provide healing and empowerment. It can weld solidarity within a community. And, perhaps most importantly, it can diminish power from an oppressor, a dominant group.

Simon Tam

#16. The feminine political voice is personal. It's intimate. It's caregiving and life enhancing. It's about bringing more love, caring and justice into the world. It's also fierce and determined.

Tabby Biddle

#17. To obtain and possess the kingdoms of the world, with their power and glory, by violent injustice is to worship Satan. To obtain and possess the kingdom, the power, and the glory by nonviolent justice is to worship God.

John Dominic Crossan

#18. People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to

Simon S. Tam

#19. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice

Chris Hedges

#20. Righteousness, or justice, is, undoubtedly of all the virtues, the surest foundation on which to create and establish a new state. But there are two nobler virtues, industry and frugality, which tend more to increase the wealth, power and grandeur of the community, than all the others without them.

Benjamin Franklin

#21. All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.

Seyla Benhabib

#22. You know well as I do that when we are talking on the human plane, questions of justice only arise when there is equal power to compel: in terms of practicality the dominant exact what they can and the weak concede what they must. (Said by Athenian envoy to the Melians)

Thucydides

#23. Artists and celebrities are citizens, and as such you have a responsibility to keep fighting for justice because there are monolithic power structures and systemic oppression out there.

Emily Saliers

#24. Every extension of the functions and power of the State beyond its primary duty of maintaining peace and justice should be scrutinized with jealous vigilance.

Ludwig Von Mises

#25. We must learn the difficult lesson that the future of Mankind will only be tolerable when our course, in world affairs as in others, is based upon justice and law rather than the threat of naked power.

Albert Einstein

#26. So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create 'social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.

Thomas Sowell

#27. A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.

Edward Gibbon

#28. And line of cases. Justice Byron R. "Whizzer" White, a JFK appointee, dissented, calling Doe an act of "raw judicial power," as it took these decisions from the states and enshrined their determination in the Supreme Court's reasoning.

William J. Bennett

#29. America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused - preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

George W. Bush

#30. Very quickly the lawyers in the Justice Department pulled together a set of recommendations about how we ought to defend the law as a constitutional matter. And it was the lawyers in the Justice Department who thought that it was important to include the tax power argument as part of it.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#31. That the military have the power to manipulate personal liberties while cocking a snook at justice and freedom in Balochistan is a fact.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#32. Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used
not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#33. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil. The greatest way to do that is through love. I believe firmly that love is a transforming power than can lift a whole community to new horizons of fair play, goodwill, and justice.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#34. Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.

Jessica Valenti

#35. Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law.

Rufus Choate

#36. If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired thatwhich could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.

Thomas Huxley

#37. Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.

Robert D. Kaplan

#38. In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained, no man can be truly free. He may have power, but he will not have freedom.

Mary Robinson

#39. Very important thing to keep in mind, that when justice comes and when injustices are remedied, they're not remedied by the initiative of the national government or the politicians. They only respond to the power of social movements.

Howard Zinn

#40. The power of the work comes through this alchemical process in which the darkness is transmuted into light, and the energy that was trapped in maintaining rigid social structures and unhealthy cultural conditioning becomes freed up and released.

William Keepin

#41. Has justice ever grown in the soil of absolute power? Has not justice always come from the ... heart and spirit of men who resist power?

Woodrow Wilson

#42. There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.

Daniel Quinn

#43. ... The political leader must constantly appraise and reappraise the means through which 'he can hope to do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him' while at the same time pursuing political values with conviction.

Nicholas Gane

#44. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.

David Mitchell

#45. The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people's hands, that is, to give them the power at all times to defend it in the legislature and in the courts of justice.

John Adams

#46. I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her.

Miles Franklin

#47. The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to those who try to remedy it.

Bertrand Russell

#48. You have extraordinary power to establish justice and make a real difference in the lives of those whom the enemy took unfair advantage of.....through trauma.

Jim Banks

#49. I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me, thumoi phileousa te, kedomene te.

Henry David Thoreau

#50. Lofty talk about 'social justice' or 'fairness' boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income - and are far more dangerous.

Thomas Sowell

#51. People have to struggle to live and, frequently, to live in an undignified way. One cause of this situation, in my opinion, is in the our relationship with money, and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society.

Pope Francis

#52. The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life.

Simon S. Tam

#53. One who was no less than the Fellow of Jehovah, the Radiance of His glory, the exact Impress of His Person. Thus we see that boundless love, inflexible justice and omnipotent power all combined to make possible the salvation of those who believe.

Arthur W. Pink

#54. In a civilization when love is
gone we turn to justice and when
justice is gone we turn to power
and when power is gone we
turn to violence.

Kare Anderson

#55. It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#56. Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved ... stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men.

Martha Gellhorn

#57. 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

#58. What the public wants is called 'politically unrealistic.' Translated into English, that means power and privilege are opposed to it.

Noam Chomsky

#59. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism.

Lierre Keith

#60. Great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if, under the influence of money or power, he neglect justice and virtue?

Plato

#61. To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.

Thomas Hobbes

#62. Some 8,000 nonviolent Occupy protesters were arrested across the nation. Not one banker or investor went to jail for causing the 2008 financial meltdown. The disparity of justice mirrored the disparity in incomes and the disparity in power.

Chris Hedges

#63. It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#64. We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#65. Anger keeps us down and hinders us from moving forward. Its power is strengthened by our longing for justice.

E'yen A. Gardner

#66. Investment that only goes to enrich an already wealthy elite bent on monopolizing both economic and political power cannot contribute toward egalite and justice
the foundation stones for a sound democracy.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#67. Women in most countries have not achieved much, because they can't be liberated under the patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist and military system that determines the way we live now, and which is governed by power, not justice, by false democracy, not real freedom.

Nawal El Saadawi

#68. Within the brain's most secret cells,
A certain lord chief justice dwells,
Of sov'reign power, whom one and all,
With common voice we reason call.

Charles Churchill

#69. And what could be more frightening than a child with total power? A spear and sword are terrible, God knows. That is why the knight who carries them is first taught pity, justice, mercy, and only last
force.

John Steinbeck

#70. The only law that means anything - that can have anything to do with God - is one that is alive and that strives for justice given the circumstances of the present. Otherwise, the law is merely something dead, a weapon in the hands of those with power. Against those with none.

Nafisa Haji

#71. Justice makes the life of such as are in prosperity, power and authority the life of a god, and injustice turns it to that of a beast.

Plutarch

#72. Wealth is attended with power, by which bargains and proceedings, contrary to universal righteousness, are supported; and hence oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul.

John Woolman

#73. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity. I know this is in our reach because we are guided by a power larger than ourselves who creates us equal in His image.

George W. Bush

#74. Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice

Bertrand Russell

#75. Once again, President Clinton is using American troops to deflect attention from his record of lies, distortions, obstructions of justice and abuse of power.

Ron Paul

#76. American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.

Samantha Power

#77. The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#78. The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reigns supreme.

Pope Benedict XVI

#79. For there is no virtue, the honor and credit for which procures a man more odium than that of justice; and this, because more than any other, it acquires a man power and authority among the common people.

Plutarch

#80. I think computing power is ready to do 3D justice. It was great for shooters and racing games in the past, but I didn't think it was right for strategy games.

Sid Meier

#81. We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

Derrick A. Bell

#82. Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.

Gary Steiner

#83. My dear friend, to be both powerful and fair has always been difficult for mankind. Power and justice have always been seen like day and night; this being the case, when one of them is there the other disappears.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#84. I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.

William T. Vollmann

#85. Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.

Dimitri A. Bogazianos

#86. Museum education has the power and the responsibility to do the challenging inner work of tackling tough topics and turning them into teachable moments.

Monica O Montgomery

#87. I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.

George Mason

#88. How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?

Michel Foucault

#89. The only government that I recognize
and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army
is that power thatestablishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.

Henry David Thoreau

#90. As far as the earth is from the stars, and fire from the sea, so is the useful from the right. Power over men perishes completely if justice begins to be observed, and respect for individual rights overcomes strongholds.

Lucan

#91. Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.

Simon Critchley

#92. I would like to appeal to all those in whose hands the future of mankind lies, to use their power not to destroy or kill, nor to create suffering in a grasping search for selfish objectives, but to help alleviate the plight of the needy; to aim at justice and freedom for the individual.

Poul Hartling

#93. Before we decide to trust you with this power, we ask you to stand before the public and explain your views. Justice may be blind, but it should not be deaf.

Herb Kohl

#94. Virtue comes through contemplation of the divine, and the exercise of philosophy. But it also comes through public service. The one is incomplete without the other. Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless.

Iain Pears

#95. Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.

Alexander McCall Smith

#96. The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

Edmund Morris

#97. All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

Theodore Bikel

#98. 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

#99. Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich-when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.

Dionysius Of Halicarnassus

#100. O]ne has to fight for justice for all. If I do not fight bigotry wherever it is, bigotry is thereby strengthened. And to the degree that it is strengthened, it will thereby have the power to turn on me."1

Don Weise