This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence.
Earth | Faith | Good | Government | Heaven | Influence | Justice | Light | Order | Peace | Truth | Blessed |
Angus Dun and Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The occasions to which the concept of the just war can be rightly applied have become highly restricted. A war to “defend the victims of wanton aggression” where the demands of justice join the demands of order, is today the clearer case of a just war… The concept of a just war does not provide moral justification for initiating a war of incalculable consequences to end such oppression.
Aggression | Consequences | Justice | Justification | Oppression | Order | War |
That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.
An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt.
It is cheap and easy to decry the injustice of others, but desperately costly to confront our own.
Joseph H. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz
Whereas in Greek the idea of justice was akin to harmony, in Hebrew it is akin to holiness.
Do you have the courage of your desires, or have you always considered your yearnings as idle and unproductive? Do you feel the wonder of existence, your own and that of everything? Does it truly do justice to that wonder to see it as an illusion or as a product of chance?
Chance | Courage | Existence | Illusion | Justice | Wonder | Yearnings |
There is not even one single thing we value when we restrict the question to ethical values. Instead, there is a plurality of different things we value, but in ethics and in life in general. In life we value pleasure, human interaction, achievement and contact with reality. In ethics we value human flourishing but also commitment and justice per se… No single set of rules seems adequate to the irreducible plurality of incommensurable things that we value.
Achievement | Commitment | Ethics | Justice | Life | Life | Pleasure | Question | Reality | Value |
Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
Life is like a tapestry that we view from the wrong side. We see all the strands and knots, and it makes no sense from the back. But there is a different view of the whole things to which we are assured some day we will be privy. In the meanwhile, there are all these knots we have to deal with existentially; the path has been charted – compassion and justice – imbued by vision. And it’s up to the individual.
Compassion | Day | Individual | Justice | Life | Life | Sense | Vision | Will | Wrong |
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Laws of Manu, aka Manusmṛti, Manusmriti, Manusmruti or Mānava-Dharmaśāstra NULL
Justice, being violated, destroys; justice, being preserved, preserves: therefore justice must not be violated, lest violated justice destroy us.
The inseparable twin of racial injustice is economic injustice.
Four things support the world: the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the good, and the valor of the brave.
Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
Virtues transcend time and culture (although their cultural expression may vary); justice and kindness, for example, will always and everywhere be virtues, regardless of how many people exhibit them.
Culture | Example | Justice | Kindness | People | Time | Will |