60 Powerful Injustice Quotes to Ignite the Power to Fight for Justice

Martin Luther King Quotes on Injustice

• "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King

• "A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true." - Martin Luther King

• "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people." - Martin Luther

• "Injustice and corruption will never be transformed by keeping them hidden, but only by bringing them out into the light and confronting them with the power of love." - Martin Luther King

• "An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is, in reality, expressing the highest respect for the law." - Martin Luther King

• "Like a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured." - Martin Luther King

• "Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary." - Martin Luther King

• "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King

• "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." - Martin Luther King

• "Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity." - Martin Luther King

Silence in the Face of Injustice Quotes

• "No democracy can exist unless each of its citizens is as capable of outrage at injustice to another as he is of outrage at injustice to himself." - Aristotle

• "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any." - Alice Walker

• "To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."

• "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

• "As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest." - Nelson Mandela

• "What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born at the moment when we accumulated silent things within us." - Gaton Bachelard

• "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. The opposite of love does not hate, it’s indifference." - Elie Wiesel

• "Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." - Paulo Freire

• "You can’t be neutral on a moving train." - Howard Zinn

• "Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on." - Thurgood Marshall

• "Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly." - Mahatma Gandhi

• "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

• "If I sit silently, I have sinned." - Mohammad Mossadegh

• "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve a lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope." - Robert F. Kennedy

• "Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor." - Ginetta Sagan

• "The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice." ~ Paul Robeson

• "For all the injustices in our past and our present, we have to believe that in the free exchange of ideas, justice will prevail over injustice, tolerance over intolerance and progress overreaction." - Hillary Clinton

Social Injustice Quotes

• "The worst form of injustice is pretended justice." - Plato

• "Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice." - Edward Bond

• "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

• "If you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Thomas Aquinas

• "When you believe in something, fight for it. And when you see injustice, fight harder than you've ever fought before." - Brad Meltzer

• "If any of you happens to see an injustice, you are no longer a spectator, you are a participant, and you have an obligation to do something." - June Callwood

• "I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason." - Alexander Theroux

• "It is better to have a war for justice than peace in injustice." - Charles Peguy

• "If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law." - Henry David Thoreau

• "To forgive and accept injustice is cowardice." - Mahatma Gandhi

• "Injustice never rules forever." - Seneca the Younger

• "True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else." - Clarence Darrow

• "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

• "An injustice to one is a threat made to all." - Baron de Montesquieu

• "There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful." - Dalai Lama

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

• "The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly." - Richard Bach

• "Whosoever does wrong, wrongs himself; whosoever does injustice, does it to himself, making himself evil." - Marcus Aurelius

• "Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations." - Ralph Nader

• "Don't make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice." - Bryant H. McGill

• "It is better to suffer injustice than to do it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The truth about injustice always sounds outrageous." - James H. Cone

• "If you have done terrible things, you must endure terrible things; for thus the sacred light of injustice shines bright." - Sophocles

• "Our society and especially those who suffer injustice need to feel the impact of our commitment to justice and our advocacy for the vulnerable." - Carolyn Custis James

• "The true conservative is the man who has a real concern for injustices and takes thought against the day of reckoning." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Racial Injustice Quotes

Injustice Quotes - Photo by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

• "Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible." - Maya Angelou

• "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin

• "It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." - Audre Lorde

• "The very serious function of racism is a distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being." - Toni Morrison

• "As long as there is a racial privilege, racism will never end." - Wayne Gerard Trotman

• "Defeating racism, tribalism, intolerance and all forms of discrimination will liberate us all, victim and perpetrator alike." - Ban Ki-Moon

• "The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward." - Ijoema Oluo

• "Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part." - John Lewis