60 Inspirational Justice Quotes to Remind You of the Importance of Justice!

Quotes About Justice

Justice Quotes - Photo by Clay Banks from Unsplash

There is an idea of balance behind the concept of justice – this is where people get what is right, just, and appropriate. We all feel we deserve equal and impartial treatment, but perhaps our concept of justice is nothing more than a way to legitimize our desire for revenge. Maybe we attach to fairness the connotations of "right" and "good" just to make ourselves feel better about our need to balance the scales.

To start, here are some of the best justice quotes you can get inspired from:

• “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.” – Charles Dickens

• “Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice.” – Charles T. Sprading

• “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” – Haile Selassie

• “Justice has always evoked ideas of equality, of proportion of compensation. Equity signifies equality. Rules and regulations, right and righteousness are concerned with equality in value. If all men are equal, then all men are of the same essence, and the common essence entitles them of the same fundamental rights and equal liberty. In short justice is another name of liberty, equality and fraternity.” – B.R. Ambedkar

• “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” – Reinhold Niebuhr

• “To know how to put what knowledge in which place is wisdom (hikmah). Otherwise, knowledge without order and seeking it without discipline does lead to confusion and hence to injustice to one’s self.” – Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas

• “The need for justice grows out of the conflict of human interests. That is to say, if there were no conflict of interests among mankind, we should never have invented the word justice, nor conceived the idea for which it stands.” – Thomas Nixon Carver

• “The just man is not the product of a day, but of a long brooding and a painful birth. To become a power for peace, a man must first pass through experiences which lead him to see things in their different aspects: it is necessary that he have a wide horizon, and breathe various atmospheres–in a word, from crossing, one after another, paths and points of view the most diverse, and sometimes the most contradictory, he must acquire the faculty of putting himself in the place of others and appreciating them.” – Charles Wagner

• “There is a certain attitude of mind that underlies the theory of justice and that ought to be strengthened by the experience of complex equality: we can think of it as a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Not the opinions of this or that individual, which may well deserve a brusque response: I mean those deeper opinions that are the reflections in individual minds, shaped also by individual thought, of the social meanings that constitute our common life. For us, and for the foreseeable future, these opinions make for autonomous distributions; and every form of dominance is therefore an act of disrespect. To argue against dominance and its accompanying inequalities, it is only necessary to attend to the goods at stake and to the shared understanding of these goods. When philosophers do this, when they write out of respect for the understandings they share with their fellow citizens, they pursue justice justly, and they reinforce the common pursuit.” – Michael Walzer

• “The safety of the people requireth further from him or them that have the sovereign power, that justice be equally administered to all degrees of people, that is, that as well the rich and mighty as poor and obscure persons may be righted of the injuries done them, so as the great may have no greater hope of impunity when they do violence, dishonor, or any injury to the meaner sort than when one of these does the like to one of them. For in this consisteth equity, to which, as being a precept of the law of Nature, a sovereign is as much subject as any of the meanest of his people.” – Thomas Hobbes

• “Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural.” – Nelson Mandela

• “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.” – Winston Churchill

• “If we expect others to rely on our fairness and justice, we must show that we rely on their fairness and justice.” – Calvin Coolidge

• “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” – Benjamin Franklin

• “Justice should remove the bandage from her eyes long enough to distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.” – Robert G. Ingersoll

Social Justice Quotes

Justice Quotes - Photo by Clay Banks from Unsplash

As well know, social justice is the view that everyone is entitled to equal economic, political, and social rights, and opportunities. Every one of us deserves justice, social justice is just as important.

To inspire you with social justice quotes, take a look below:

• “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.” ― Ernesto Che Guevara

• “For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.” ― N.K. Jemisin

• “The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.” ― Marcus Garvey

• “Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.” ― Arundhati Roy

• “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” ― Martin Luther King Jr

• “It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time.” ― Martin Luther King Jr

• “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” ― Dorothy Day

• “When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else's oppression, we'll find our opportunities to make real change.” ― Ijeoma Oluo

• “The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, do we deserve to kill?” ― Bryan Stevenson

• “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better.” ― Georg Lichtenberg

• “Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.” ― Ha-Joon Chang

• “Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.” ― Terry Eagleton

• “And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

• “I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.” ― C.S. Lewis

• “Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.” ― H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Quotes on Justice

Justice Quotes - Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm from Flickr

Let Tripboba continue this article of justice quote with more justice quotes. But before we do, just as a reminder that justice is one of the most important moral values in the field of law and politics.

• “Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 meter race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.” ― Ha-Joon Chang

• “The American people have this to learn: that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property is safe.” ― Frederick Douglass

• “The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.” ― Abraham Lincoln

• “The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die. […] a ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.” ― George R.R. Martin

• “If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you’re allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.” ― Shannon L. Alder

• “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ― Elie Wiesel

• “Courage is of no value unless accompanied by justice; yet if all men became just, there would be no need for courage.” ― Agesilaus the Second

• “Justice is a contract of expediency, entered upon to prevent men harming or being harmed.” ― Epicurus

• “The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.” ― Aristotle

• “Jedi do not fight for peace. That’s only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.” ― Matthew Woodring Stover

• “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

• “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” ― Desmond Tutu

• “This thing that men call justice, this blind snake that strikes men down in the dark, mindless with fury, keep your hand back from it, pass by in ” ― Maxwell Anderson

• “Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That’s what justice is.” ― Joseph Heller

• “Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Some see an innocent victim. Others will see evil incarnate getting exactly what’s deserved.” ― Emily Thorne