unfairness Quotes

“Never complain or make excuses. If something seems unfair, just prove yourself by working twice as hard and being twice as good.”

“Life, I’ve learned, is never fair. If people teach anything in school, that should be it.”

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…”

“‘Everybody wants to talk about how Khalil died,’ I say. ‘But this isn’t about how Khalil died. It’s about the fact that he lived. His life mattered. Khalil lived!’ I look at the cops again. ‘You hear me? Khalil lived!’”

″‘It’s so unfair,’ said Bruno. ‘I don’t see why I have to be stuck over here on this side of the fence where there’s no one to talk to and no one to play with and you get to have dozens of friends and are probably playing for hours every day. I’ll have to speak to Father about it.‘”

“The girl wondered: These policemen... didn’t they have families, too? Didn’t they have children? Children they went home to? How could they treat children this way? Were they told to do so, or did they act this way naturally? Were they in fact machines, not human beings? She looked closely at them. They seemed of flesh and bone. They were men. She couldn’t understand.”

“There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. ‘Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?’ ”

“The Whites told only one side. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told”

“It’s like I live in a cage with no door and no key. And I have no way to tell someone how to get me out.”

“I wondered if she would teach able-bodied third graders the same way. Probably not. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.”

“It seemed unreasonable to limit everyone’s life choices based on your ancestors’ ability to help the government, but that was how it all worked out.”

“I knew it wasn’t fair, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help it. And after a while, the anger I felt just sort of became part of me, like it was the only way I knew how to handle the grief. I didn’t like who I’d become, but I was stuck in this horrible cycle of questions and blame.”

“I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.”

“I understand that secrecy is part of, well, an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity. And when you deprive your friends . . . of experiences like I had, you’re basically stealing from them. You’re depriving them of something they have a right to.”

“They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us, white folks all, have decided it’s time for you to die, because this is a convenient date and time.”

“I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do…Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”

“If slavery had been abolished I too could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws.”

“I have been living in this country nine years longer than you have. Do you realize that? Yet I am prevented by law from becoming a citizen. I am prevented by law from owning land. I am now separated from my family without cause.”

“I couldn’t understand why he was home all day, when Mama had to go out working. I was ashamed of him for that and, in a deeper way, for being what had led to our imprisonment, that is, for being so unalterably Japanese.”

“There are days when the close attention I must give to details chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but soon I recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart.”

“Mr. Drummond. You’ve got to call the whole thing off. It’s not too late. Bert knows he did wrong. He didn’t mean to. And he’s sorry. Now why can’t he just stand up and say to everybody: ‘I did wrong. I broke a law. I admit it. I won’t do it again.’ Then they’d stop all this fuss, and—everything would be like it was.”

“Cates, I’ll change your plea and we’ll call off the whole business—on one condition. If you honestly believe you committed a criminal act against the citizens of the state and the minds of their children. If you honestly believe that you’re wrong and the law’s right. Then the hell with it.”

“My third comfort Starr’d most unluckily, is from my breast, The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, Haled out to murder: myself on every post Proclaimed a strumpet: with immodest hatred The child-bed privilege denied, which ‘longs To women of all fashion; lastly, hurried Here to this place, i’ the open air, before I have got strength of limit.”

“Although the operators fought the battle and by all accounts saved about twenty American lives, because they were neither CIA staffers nor active military personnel they were deemed ineligible for even higher awards, awards that went to other men who played smaller roles and never fired a shot.”

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal, living in a world of inflexible natural laws.”

“It becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don’t hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.”

“Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything?”

“I hope you don’t expect fairness from me, Alina. It isn’t one of my specialties.”

“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”

“Exposure to the heat was killing me; August 12, 101: why? Dallas 98. Miami 96. You don’t have to be Einstein to see the unfairness of it.”

“It was rigged, the whole thing, every year. There were no more nominations and then came the vote. Marion Hawthorne got it. Every year either Marion or Rachel Hennessey got it.”

“Life isn’t fair, Natsworthy.”

“Johnny Warren says there’s lots of things aren’t fair in our town. Like blacks aren’t supposed to drink in the pub, not many of them anyway; and not him.”

″‘My Mum and Dad reckon it stinks, that’s what.’ ‘What stinks?’ asked Brett, still keeping his voice low. ‘That blacks get things for nothing that everyone else has to work hard for.‘”

″‘He’s already lacking a finger. He has stolen before. He must have known the punishment. If he valued his hand so much, why did he steal?’ ‘How do we know? How do we know what has driven the poor wretch to steal? How do we know what he has to bear?‘”

“Why must the young die and the old wrecks go on living? Why do little children die? I shall never, never forgive God for that, do you hear?”

“I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else.... What sort of life could we build on such foundations?”

“Doesn’t seem fair. Nobody ever paid me any attention. I skated by. Kept my head low. Now I’m famous.”

“Kingshaw was used to lacking any confidence in himself, to knowing that he could do nothing very well. Until now, he had not much cared how he’d got by. Now, he cared, his pride had risen, he could no longer be docile about himself. Everything was unfair.

“Does Pop know Officer Moore gets paid for not working? For killing me? I want to kick something, scream, break down. But what’s the use?”

“The nonfiction books he tried were mostly called things like “When I Was a Boy in Greece,” or “Happy Days on the Prairie”—things that made them sound like stories, only they weren’t. They made Mark furious. ‘It’s being made to learn things not on purpose. It’s unfair,’ he said. ‘It’s sly’”

“It may not seem fair, but it is legal.”

“Rowan sighed. He had probably been over-optimistic, expecting to find solitude down here so close to the jetty and the rocky little beach beloved of the local friends, but id did seem rather unfair that the only company he did attract that of a boring kid who played football with a beer-can.”

“If a girl’s as rich as that she’s no right to be a good-looker as well. And she is a good-looker... Got everything, that girl has. Doesn’t seem fair...”

What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days.

“Nothing—only look at the almanack on that wall;” he pointed to a framed sheet hanging near the window, and continued, “The crosses are for the evenings you have spent with the Lintons, the dots for those spent with me. Do you see? I’ve marked every day.”

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”