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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:

As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may indeed injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law.

Thomas Jefferson

Pur dishonest Judgm't Judges povent estre punv. Mirror de Justices report que 44 fueront pendus pur cest cause: For dishonest judgment Judges may be punished. Mirror of Justices reports that 44 were hanged for this cause.

John Vaughan J., Bushel's Case (1670)

The blessings we associate with a life of refinement and culture can be made universal. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Jane Addams

Is not the winding up witnesses,
And nicking, more than half the bus'ness?
For witnesses, like watches, go
Just as they're set, too fast or slow;
And where in Conscience they're strait-lac'd,
'Tis ten to one that side is cast.

Samuel Butler Hudibras, Part II (1664)

Whenever there is a real likelihood that the Judge would, from kindred or any other cause, have a bias in favour of one of the parties, it would be very wrong in him to act, and we are not to be understood to say that where there is a real bias of this sort this Court would not interfere.

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn Reg. v. Rand (1867)

How can law be just? — impossible. It is against the people who have nothing, it is for the people who have everything. It is always in favor of the haves - it is made by the haves, it is a conspiracy of the haves against the have-nots. In all societies it has been so, the law is always unjust. Your so-called justice is just a pretension. The world where ownership exists cannot be a just world.

Rajneesh

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

H. L. Mencken

Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

Leo Tolstoy

Portia: To offend, and judge, are distinct offices
And of opposed natures.

William Shakespeare Merchant of Venice (1596)

As far as I'm concerned, the mark of a good justice or a good judge is an opinion you can read and have no idea whether it was written by a man or a woman, a Republican or a Democrat or a Christian or a Jew. The most important thing is quality and competence and temperament and character and diligence.

Potter Stewart

My servant ... was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Isaiah

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

Charles Dickens

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.

James Madison

It is our moral obligation as human beings who share this time and this place to not punish, but rather to remain calm, to open up communication, and to place our hands gently on each other’s shoulders and say, “Think twice.”

Sarah Schulman Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy.

William Shakespeare

I show it most of all when I show justice;
For then I pity those I do not know,
Which a dismiss'd offence would after gall;
And do him right that, answering one foul wrong,
Lives not to act another.

William Shakespeare Measure for Measure (1603)

I have done the state some service, and they know't;
No more of that, I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.

William Shakespeare Othello (1603)

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

Emma Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that 'if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression', human rights should be protected by the rule of law. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.

Aung San Suu Kyi In Quest of Democracy (1991)

Almost all crime depends on the acquiescence of the victim. If the victim refuses his assigned role, the criminal is placed at a disadvantage, one so severe that it usually takes an understanding and compassionate judge to set things right. I had broken the rules; I had fought back.

Robert A. Heinlein The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)

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