injustice Quotes

“Those are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom’s jury, but you saw something come between them and reason. You saw the same thing that night in front of the jail. When that crew went away, they didn’t go as reasonable men, they went because we were there. There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried.”

“How could they do it, how could they?” “I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”

“With a clean-shaven face and lopsided yet neatly combed hair, he had walked out of that building a new man. In fact, he walked out German. Hang on a second, he was German. Or more to the point, he had been.”

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

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“JUROR: #10: You’re not gonna’ tell me we’re supposed to believe this kid, knowing what he is.”

“In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”

“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

“Because the major part hath by consenting voices declared a sovereign, he that dissented must now consent with the rest; that is, be contented to avow all the actions he shall do, or else justly be destroyed by the rest. For if he voluntarily entered into the congregation of them that were assembled, he sufficiently declared thereby his will, and therefore tacitly covenanted, to stand to what the major part should ordain: and therefore if he refuse to stand thereto, or make protestation against any of their decrees, he does contrary to his covenant, and therefore unjustly.”

“You know they’ll try to kill you if you actually get to the bottom of everything.”

“I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?”

“Capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment.‘”

“Choosing to be unoffendable, or relinquishing my right to anger, does not mean accepting injustice. It means actively seeking justice, and loving mercy, while walking humbly with God. And that means remembering I’m not Him. What a relief.”

“People say we have to get angry to fight injustice, but I’ve noticed that the best police officers don’t do their jobs in anger. The best soldiers don’t function out of anger. Anger does not enhance judgment.”

“You find that the injustice that created a wound is no longer true, right now, in this moment.”

“There will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others.”

“Why was being Jewish so dreadful? Why were Jews being treated like this?”

“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?’ ”

“What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it.”

“For the highest reach of injustice is, to be deemed just when you are not.”

“Someone did us all a grave injustice by implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.”

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”

“I have wanted . . . to commit a murder myself. I recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself! . . . But—incongruous as it may seem to some—I was restrained and hampered by my innate sense of justice. The innocent must not suffer.”

″ Twelve white men say a black man must die, and another white man sets the date and time without consulting one black person. Justice? ”

“How do people come up with a date and time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”

“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.”

“So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin.”

“Why do so many people do nothing? I think it’s because most of us look at the evils and injustice around us, and we become overwhelmed.”

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

“We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love. That was King’s dream—a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting for.”

“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen).”

“Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.”

“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen).”

“A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time. Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge the public consensus that underlies the prevailing system of control.”

“racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.”

“The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias.”

“Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem. The fact that the meaning of race may evolve over time or lose much of its significance is hardly a reason to be struck blind. ”

“Highly sensitive children need to feel heard, as they often have deep feelings or good reasons for what they were doing and they are unusually disillusioned by injustice. Getting an accurate statement of your child’s feelings and viewpoint will help both of you decide what to do.”

“You wrong me, and I will not be wronged. So let us have it out, God. Face me! Be a man and face me now if you have the guts - stand and draw or back off!”

“Even though the Point was only half an hour’s drive from the Port, the two towns didn’t have much to do with one another. The footy was really the only place where Nungas and Goonyas got to hand around together.”

“‘Nukkin ya?’ said Pickles. ‘Geez, you’re talking like one of them now.’ ‘So what,’ I said. ‘Well I s’pose he is a mate of yours and all,’ said Pickles. ‘Matter of fact, he is,’ I said.”

“I have a future ahead of me that will likely include an Ivy League education, an eventual law degree, and a career in public policy. Sadly, during the wee hours of this morning, literally none of that mattered.”

“A reason that had to do with the sameness of each and every week. She was bored with simply being straight-A’s Claudia Kinkaid. She was tired of arguing about whose turn it was to choose the Sunday night seven-thirty television show, of injustice, and of the monotony of everything.”