Quotes about Justice

Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man.

He who has not been a determined accuser during prosperity should hold his peace in adversity.

The convict was transfigured into Christ.

He asked himself... whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.

Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And are you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.

In democratic states, the only governments founded on justice, it sometimes happens that a faction usurps power; then the whole rises up, and the necessary vindication of its right may go so far as armed conflict.

Liberation is not deliverance. A convict may leave prison behind but not his sentence.

We must look elsewhere for Eden. Spring is good; but freedom and justice are better. Eden is moral, not material.

The social edifice of the past rests on three columns,—the priest, the king, and the hangman.

I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture his children and his grandchildren, and hear them cry without being tortured himself.

We have no idea any more what it means to feel guilty. The communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them, murdurers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent in his soul and conscience than Oedipus, and yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.

The churches failed to realize that the working-class movement was the movement of the humiliated and oppressed supplicating for justice. They did not choose to work with and for them to create the kingdom of God on earth. By siding with the oppressors, they deprived the working-class movement of God. And now they reproach it for being godless. The Pharisees!