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JUSTICE QUOTES

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"It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom."
-- Maurice Maeterlinck

* "If we want to reap the harvest of peace and justice in the future, we will have to sow seeds of nonviolence, here and now, in the present."
-- Mairead Corrigan Maguire

* Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life . . .
-- Nelson Mandela

"Trade justice for the developing world and for this generation is a truly significant way for the developed countries to show commitment to bringing about an end to global poverty."
-- Nelson Mandela

"I have tremendous confidence in the capacity of the poor to transform not only their own lives but also to build a just, humane, and democratic society."
-- Ruth Manorama

It is a good moment to repeat that a war is never won. Never mind that history books tell us the opposite. The psychological and material costs of war are so high that any triumph is a pyrrhic victory. Only peace can be won and winning peace means not only avoiding armed conflict but finding ways of eradicating the causes of individual and collective violence: injustice and oppression, ignorance and poverty, intolerance and discrimination. We must construct a new set of values and attitudes to replace the culture of war which, for centuries, has been influencing the course of civilization. Winning peace means the triumph of our pledge to establish, on a democratic basis, a new social framework of tolerance and generosity from which no one will feel excluded.
-- Federico Mayor

The students I've been with these twenty years are looking for a world where it becomes a little easier to love and a lot harder to hate, where learning nonviolence means that we dedicate our hearts, minds, time, and money to a commitment that the force of love, the force of truth, the force of justice, and the force of organized resistance to corrupt power are seen as sane and the force of fists, guns, armies, and bombs insane.
-- Colman McCarthy

* "It's too easy only to blame the militarists, racists, sexists and other pushers of violence for the mess we're in. What is harder is self-examination, moving beyond caring by looking inward to ask the personal question: What more should I be doing everyday to bring about a peace and justice based world, whether across the ocean or across the living room?"
-- Colman McCarthy

And this is the time. It is the time for this land to become again a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs. It is the time to live more with faith and less with fear- with an abiding confidence that can sweep away the strongest barriers between us and teach us that we truly are brothers and sisters.
-- George McGovern


* "We are way more powerful when we turn to each other and not on each other, when we celebrate our diversity, focus on our commonality, and together tear down the mighty walls of injustice."
-- Cynthia McKinney

* "The basic goal of labor will not change. It is -- as it has always been, and I am sure always will be -- to better the standards of life for all who work for wages and to seek decency and justice and dignity for all Americans."
-- George Meany

* "Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples."
-- Rigoberta Menchú

* It is truly only when we begin to see that injustice is only a symptom and an opportunity to design new models of governance, education and other options within the fields of endeavors that we will learn how it is to become truly conscious HUMANS.
-- Nina Meyerhof


An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
-- Montesquieu

* "Our motto is to work for peace based on social justice. Our mandate is to improve the condition, health and safety of workers, and our mission is universal."
-- David A. Morse

* “Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance.”
-- Bill Moyers
* A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
-- Ralph Nader

We never will get a full situation of open transparency, but we should seek to bring forth the major concerns about injustice and suffering and dishonesty. This needs to come into the open or there will never be peace in the hearts of us violated.
-- Beyers Naudé

* We could dramatically accelerate innovations in sustainability and social justice just by making choices to use our money for positive solutions.
-- Carol Newell

I think those of us who have extraordinary wealth have an opportunity to leverage that wealth to stimulate a just and sustainable economy. I know it goes against the grain but I know it's possible. It's just about deciding what kind of choices we want to make.
-- Carol Newell

 

”Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
-- Reinhold Niebuhr

* We've got a lot of work to do economically in this country to bring about a more just and fair economy.
-- Barack Obama

"Refugee problems may often seem intractable but they are not insoluble. In our experience there are two basic prerequisites for solution: the political will of leaders to tackle the causes and to settle for peace, and international determination to push for peace and then to consolidate it. Consolidating peace means helping societies emerging from war to reintegrate refugees in safety and dignity, to rebuild their institutions - including in the field of justice and human rights - and to resume their economic development."
-- Sadako Ogata

The whole system has not one redeeming quality; its very virtues, as they are termed, are vices of great magnitude. Its charities, so called, are gross acts of injustice and deception. Its instructions are to rivet ignorance in the mind and, if possible, render it perpetual. It supports, in all manner of extravagance, idleness, presumption, and uselessness; and oppresses, in almost every mode which ingenuity can devise, industry, integrity and usefulness. It encourages superstition, bigotry and fanaticism; and discourages truth, commonsense and rationality. It generates and cultivates every inferior quality and base passion that human nature can be made to receive; and has so disordered all the human intellects, that they have become universally perplexed and confused, so that man has no just title to be called a reasonable and rational being. It generates violence, robbery and murder, and extols and rewards these vices as the highest of all virtues. Its laws are founded in gross ignorance of individual man and of human society; they are cruel and unjust in the extreme, and, united with all the superstitions in the world, are calculated only to teach men to call that which is pre-eminently true and good, false and bad; and that which is glaringly false and bad, true and good. In short, to cultivate with great care all that leads to vice and misery in the mass, and to exclude from them, with equal care, all that would direct them to true knowledge and real happiness, which alone, combined, deserve the name of virtue.
-- Robert Owen

* I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
-- Thomas Paine

* "I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people."
-- Rosa Parks

* "Out of our first century of national life we evolved the ethical principle that it was not right or just that an honest and industrious man should live and die in misery. He was entitled to some degree of sympathy and security. Our conscience declared against the honest workman's becoming a pauper, but our eyes told us that he very often did."
-- Frances Perkins

Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.
~ Channing E. Phillips

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 1948) in most solemn form, the dignity of a person is acknowledged to all human beings; and as a consequence there is proclaimed, as a fundamental right, the right of free movement in search for truth and in the attainment of moral good and of justice, and also the right to a dignified life. 
-- Pope John XXIII, 1881-1963 Pacem in Terris, 1963

Let us not accept violence as the way of peace. Let us instead begin by respecting true freedom: the resulting peace will be able to satisfy the world's expectations, for it will be a peace built on justice, a peace founded on the incomparable dignity of the free human being.
-- Pope John Paul II

We are privileged to have the opportunity of contributing to the achievement of the goal of the abolition of war and its replacement by world law. I am confident that we shall succeed in this great task; that the world community will thereby be freed not only from the suffering caused by war but also through the better use of the earth's resources, of the discoveries of scientists, and of the efforts of mankind, from hunger, disease, illiteracy, and fear; and that we shall in the course of time be enabled to build a world characterized by economic, political, and social justice for all human beings and a culture worthy of man's intelligence.
-- Linus Pauling

"Salvation for a race, nation or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted; and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship."
-- A. Philip Randolph

* Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.
-- A. Philip Randolph

* Thinking about how the world might be and envisioning a society characterized by justice are the essence of conceptualizing the conditions that comprise positive peace. If we are to educate for peace, both teachers and students need to have some notion of the transformed world we are educating for.
-- Betty Reardon

"We are moved to deep humility by the knowledge that even as we are blazing new trails into an as yet uncharted future, we are following in the footsteps of a vast legacy of spiritual leaders and social change makers. The struggle for justice is as old as tyranny itself, and the longing for a world guided by love is as old as the human heart. Thank you for joining us in carrying the great dream forward through the next generation."
~ Ocean Robbins


* If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.
-- Anita Roddick

For here lies the corner stone of all the injustices done woman, the wrong idea from which all other wrongs proceed. She is not acknowledged as mistress of herself. For her cradle to her grave she is another's. We do indeed need and demand the other rights of which I have spoken, but let us first obtain OURSELVES."
-- Ernestine Rose

* Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home. 
-- Carl T. Rowan

"If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are altered."
-- Josephine Ruffin

Today in America as in other parts of the world we see a model of a society in which the powerful dominate. They marginalize and they go as far as to eliminate the weakest before the homogenization caused by this system of globalization. Through providence we have the taking of conscious cultural identity. As such the church has a special mission to be the defender and promoter of a culture of life. This culture of life assumes a preferential option for the poor, opposes or puts the globalization of solidarity in opposition to the globalization of the markets. It makes itself a voice for those who have no voice; denounces all violence, all racial discrimination; walks beside those condemned to the land, those that are displaced; is a promoter of integral development in the construction of peace in the search for justice and liberation. This culture of life is what is expressed as a service of hope. This urgency exists in this precise moment in which the indigenous person, conscious of being a subject to their own history, will not opt for a church that submerges them in a conflict where they have to live their faith being aware of expressing it within a dominant culture. -- Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia

"We learned that we could move others to take action...Even though we couldn't stop the war, I discovered that I could be involved in the movement for peace and justice. From that day on I knew that I was going to be committed to working for change...."
-- Marla Ruzicka

Justice Quotes

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Justice Day - July 17

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