Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
—Malcolm X
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
—Malcolm X
If I were a Brazilian without land or money or the means to feed my children, I would be burning the rain forest, too.
—Sting
Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph: killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.
—Leonard Cohen
People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
—E. B. White
Justice is truth in action.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Given the ethnic and racial hierarchies of American life, there are those who dish it out and those who have to take it. Some get to dish it out without ever having to take it, some take it from those above and dish it out to those below, and some find themselves in the position of always having to take it. Such a position is, psychologically and emotionally speaking, almost unbearable. Rage and despair accumulate with no place to go.
—Elizabeth Stone
All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.
—Michelle Alexander
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
—Anatole France
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
—Lillian Hellman
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
—Lydia Maria Child
I look at the politics of this country as a game that is played on the people, this illusion of choice. It's interesting that the important things have been reduced in number: oil companies, communications, pharmaceuticals, insurance, banking, accounting, all these firms have been merged and reduced. The choices are very limited. But if you want a bagel, we've got twenty-six flavors. There are four hundred kinds of mustard in this country. These are the illusions of choice. I don't really think choice is here to any substantive degree.
—George Carlin
The only real struggle in the history of the world … is between the vested interest and social justice.
—Arnold Toynbee
Justice without love is not justice. Love without justice is not love.
—Mother Teresa