Skip to content

Justice Quotes

By a wide margin the most quotes here are Shakespeare’s, and the two judges who follow him, Lord Mansfield and Lord Kenyon, are a sign that this page leans on the bench as much as the stage. Seneca and John Rawls fill out the top five.

Among the sourced entries, Bierce’s definition from 1911 describes justice as a commodity the State sells to citizens as a reward for their allegiance, taxes and personal service. Sartre’s Dirty Hands (1948) and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) are here for what they say about guilt, not courts.

Three lines carry flags: Marlowe’s “the justice of my quarrel,” Augustine on charity and withheld justice, and a Martin Luther King Jr. line about peace and justice being goals for man.

Random quote on Justice

Most quoted on justice:

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Ovid

It is by our achievements that we shall be judged.

Chaim Weizmann

So justice while she winks at crimes,
Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Samuel Butler Hudibras, Canto II (1664)

Justice in the extreme is often unjust.

Jean Racine

To those outside the law I became as one outside the law—not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ—that I might win those outside the law.

Paul of Tarsus

Who ever knew an honest brute
at law his neighbor prosecute?

Jonathan Swift The Logicians Refuted (1735)

Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's.

Jesus

Piecemeal they win this acre first then, that,
Glean on, and gather up the whole estate.

Alexander Pope

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. [...] But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

Donella Meadows Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

Abraham Lincoln The House Divided speech (1858)

Any law that takes hold of a man’s daily life cannot prevail in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative are the laws which protect life.

Henry Ward Beecher

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."

Søren Kierkegaard

It was nobly said in another place (I heard it with pleasure, and thought it becoming the dignity of the person who pronounced it, and the place in which it was pronounced) "that the law is best applied, when it is subservient to the honesty of the case."

Sir Francis Buller, 1st Baronet Master v. Miller (1791)

It doth appear you are a worthy judge,
You know the law; your exposition
Hath been most sound

William Shakespeare Merchant of Venice (1596)

Some laws are not written, but are more decisive than any written law.

Seneca the Elder

Justice renders to every one his due.

Cicero

"No, no!" said the Queen. Sentence first—verdict afterwards.

Lewis Carroll

The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring strength. The reminder of Jehovah is trustworthy, making the inexperienced one wise.

David

Something lingering with boiling oil in it…. something humorous but lingering—with either boiling oil or melted lead.

W. S. Gilbert

Thou mockest? Tremble! the avenger's lightning bolts do not forever dormant lie.

Christoph Martin Wieland

Related topics