In a world where the pursuit of justice is an ever-evolving journey, words often provide us with the guidance and motivation we need to keep pushing forward. Whether it's fighting for equality, standing up for the oppressed, or striving to create a fairer society, inspirational quotes can serve as powerful reminders of our collective responsibility. This curated collection of the top 64 justice quotes brings together wisdom from visionaries, leaders, and activists who have dedicated their lives to advancing justice and equality. Let these words inspire and empower you to act, dream, and continue the fight for a more just world.
1. “Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.” - Mark Helprin
2. “If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.” - David Sedaris
3. “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
4. “It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.” - John Adams
5. “Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard, don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.” - Alan Dershowitz
6. “In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest.” - William Penn
7. “Ladies who play with fire must remember that smoke gets in their eyes.” - Mae West
8. “But men often mistake killing and revenge for justice. They seldom have the stomach for justice.” - Robert Jordan
9. “Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” - William Gaddis
10. “Never pray for justice, because you might get some.” - Margaret Atwood
11. “Wer es zulässt, dass man ihn beleidigt, verdient es.” - Pierre Corneille
12. “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
13. “Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.” - Matthew Woodring Stover
14. “A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.” - H.G. Wells
15. “Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.” - Dorothy Thompson
16. “Were God to show grace to all of Adam's descendants, men would at once conclude that He was righteously compelled to take them to heaven as meet compensation for allowing the human race to fall into sin. But the great God in under no obligation to any of his creatures, least of all to those who are rebels against him.” - Arthur W. Pink
17. “Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.” - Frederick Douglass
18. “Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don't run our country that way.” - Raymond Chandler
19. “Let him who glories glory in this, That he understands and knows Me, That I am the LORD, exercising loving kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these I delight,” says the LORD.” - Anonymous
20. “Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero
21. “Part of me wants justice for this. Part of me wants to never cause harm to another.” - Ken Scholes
22. “I believe [...] that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.” - Neil Gaiman
23. “The Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” - John Marshall
24. “For this new-married man approaching here,Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong'dYour well defended honour, you must pardonFor Mariana's sake: but as he adjudged your brother,--Being criminal, in double violationOf sacred chastity and of promise-breachThereon dependent, for your brother's life,--The very mercy of the law cries outMost audible, even from his proper tongue,'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!'Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;Like doth quit like, and MEASURE still FOR MEASURE” - William Shakespeare
25. “Go to the internet and go to the FBI website and go to their international list of top ten terrorists. You will see Bin Laden there, bring his name up and his picture. Amazingly, all the charges: the embassy of '98 and this other stuff is all listed. But, ironically nothing on 9/11. NOTHING! Now when the FBI was pressed as to why 9/11 wasn't included, their response was "We don't have enough evidence." Now, people, if you're like me that is extremely disturbing; we've fought two wars, we've changed our entire foreign policy and we've had the PATRIOT act put on us, all, supposedly, because of Osama Bin Laden!” - Jesse Ventura
26. “Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females. In actuality, dominator culture teaches us that we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role. In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.” - bell hooks
27. “Nearly all men have weak hearts, in one way or another.” - Steven J. Carroll
28. “You cannot be fair to others without first being fair to yourself.Know that a well-honed sense of justice is a measure of personal experience, and all experience is a measure of self.Know that the highest expression of justice is mercy.Thus, as the supreme judge in your own court, you must have compassion for yourself.Otherwise, cede your gavel.” - Vera Nazarian
29. “Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.” - Howard Zinn
30. “To know how to put what knowledge in which place is wisdom (hikmah). Otherwise, knowledge without order and seeking it without discipline does lead to confusion and hence to injustice to one's self.” - Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
31. “Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myself more than others? No. What! if I should be prompt only to punish others and not myself, I should be a wretched indeed! - Javert to M. Madeleine” - Victor Hugo
32. “Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
33. “When it comes to world news, attitude is what marks the distinction between justice and vengeance. Justice is pure, but vengeance brings more ruin.” - Criss Jami
34. “Veganism is not about giving anything up or losing anything; it is about gaining the peace within yourself that comes from embracing nonviolence and refusing to participate in the exploitation of the vulnerable” - GaryLFrancione
35. “You cannot live a nonviolent life as long as you are consuming violence. Please consider going vegan.” - GaryLFrancione
36. “Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.” - GaryLFrancione
37. “The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.” - GaryLFrancione
38. “To say that a being who is sentient has no interest in continuing to live is like saying that a being with eyes has no interest in continuing to see. Death—however “humane”—is a harm for humans and nonhumans alike.” - Gary L. Francione
39. “Justice might well prevail in the end, but ordinary people like me had no guarantee of surviving that long. We might get killed on the whim of some serial killer first.” - Kouhei Kadono
40. “Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.” - Derrick A. Bell
41. “Once, I remember, Father Abbot said that our purpose is justice, and with God lies the privilege of mercy. But even God, when he intends mercy, needs tools to his hand.” - Ellis Peters
42. “Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches.” - Neil Gaiman
43. “Don’t misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I’m talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what’s going on.” - N.T. Wright
44. “คนยากจนต้องต่อสู้อย่างหนักเพื่อความเป็นอยู่อันจำเป็น คนมั่งมีต่อสู้เพื่อการสะสม แล้วในที่สุดไปจากโลกนี้ คนทั้งสองประเภทก็ไปโดยทำนองเดียวกัน คือไปด้วยมือเปล่าแท้ๆ การสะสมทรัพย์สมบัติไว้จนไม่มีทางจะใช้นั้น เขาทำเพื่ออะไรกัน...เมื่อที่สุดมนุษย์เรา จะต้องเหมือนกันเช่นนี้ทั้งหมด?” - ศรีบูรพา (กุหลาย สายประดิษฐ์)
45. “Tighe took control of his thoughts.“You need to use the bathroom. When I tell you to, go into the house. Two cats will try to comein with you. You must let them in. Don’t allow anyone to stop them. Once inside the house, you’llgo into the bathroom and close the door, pull down your pants, then curl up on the floor and go tosleep.”The bastard’s career would be over when they caught him, literally, with his pants down. But hedeserved it for kicking a cat.” - Pamela Palmer
46. “Virtue comes through contemplation of the divine, and the exercise of philosophy. But it also comes through public service. The one is incomplete without the other. Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless.” - Iain Pears
47. “In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you've heard the other side.” - Euripides
48. “Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.” - William Cullen Bryant
49. “How good life is when one does something good and just!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
50. “We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity’s rebellion from God.” - R.C. Sproul
51. “When the injustice is great enough, justice will lend me the strength needed to correct it. None may stand against it. It will shatter every barrier, sunder any shield, tear through any enchantment, and lend its servant the power to pass sentence. Know this: There is nothing on all the Planes that can stay the hand of justice when it is brought against them. It may unmake armies. It may sunder the thrones of gods. Know that for all who betray justice, I am their fate. And fate carries an executioner's axe.” - Chris Avellone
52. “Freedom flourishes upon the bedrock of ethics and integrity.” - Mollie Marti
53. “I wish you would thrash him. He deserves it."She looked back at him. "I will one day, sir. I'm getting tired of falling down.” - Tamora Pierce
54. “True peace required the presence of justice, not just the absence of conflict.” - N.K. Jemisin
55. “There is a kind of virtue that lies not in extraordinary actions, not in saving poor orphans from burning buildings, but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings comply with decent fire codes.” - Randy Cohen
56. “What is more, sir," his lordship went on, "I believe I have a good idea of what you mean by 'professionalism.' It appears to mean getting one's way by cheating and manipulating. It appears to mean serving the dictates of greed and advantage rather than those of goodness and the desire to see justice prevail in the world. If that is the 'professionalism' you refer to, sir, I don't care much for it and have no wish to acquire it.” - Kazuo Ishiguro
57. “THERE IS NO JUSTICE" said Death "JUST ME” - Terry Pratchett
58. “Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. - John Galsworthy, Justice [1910], act II” - John Galsworthy
59. “I have the documents. Documents, proof, evidence, photograph, signature. One day you raise your right hand and you are American. They give you an American Pass port. The United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their photograph. The other one. Their signature their seals. Their own image. And you learn the executive branch the legislative branch and the third. Justice. Judicial branch. It makes the difference The rest is past.” - Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
60. “Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.” - Svetlana Aleksievich
61. “God is merciful to all, as he has been to you; he is first a father, then a judge.” - Alexandre Dumas
62. “Lem glowered. "Your lion friends ride into some village, take all the food and every coin they find, and call it foraging. the wolves as well, so why not us? no one robbed you, dog. You just been good and foraged.” - George R.R. Martin
63. “The natural and untainted male mind respects and loves the woman and her magnificent scope of capability and creative gifts.” - Bryant McGill
64. “Duty comes in many forms; at times duty to country may conflict with duty to family. Yet, with a lucid mind the guises can be torn away and in the end, duty becomes but one, and that duty is to value justice above everything--to do what is right not because someone ordains it, but because the heart which is the seat of truth decrees it so.” - F. Sionil José
