Inspirational Quotes on Justice

“We’re all, by and large, comparatively speaking, rich people and have perhaps more than one home. And yet the question is, are we really at home anywhere? Are we really at home in any of our homes? Because it seems to me that to be at home somewhere means to be at peace somewhere and I have a feeling at some deep level there can really be no peace for any of us, no real home for any of us, until there is some measure of real peace for everybody until everybody has a home.”

“When they became wicked, they started to talk about brotherhood and humaneness and understood these ideas. When they became criminals, they invented justice and lay down complete codes of law to maintain it, and to secure these codes they erected a guillotine. They remembered only a tiny bit of what they had lost; they didn’t even want to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They even laughed at the possibility of this former happiness of theirs and called it a dream.”

“Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement—not replace—the process of change through legal recourse. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.”

“As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.”

“The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.”

“It only needs a good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.”

“... laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed; And, close as sin and suffering joined, We march to Fate abreast.”

“The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom in one majestic chorus”

“We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.”