This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder." - Coretta Scott King
"Cheating thrives where unfairness reigns, along with economic anxiety. It thrives where government is the weak captive of wealthy interests and lacks the will to do justice impartially. It thrives where money and success are king, and winners are fawned over whatever their daily abuses of power." - David Callahan
"What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice." - Demosthenes NULL
"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
"Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive." - Earl Warren
"The success of any legal system is measured by its fidelity to the universal ideal of justice." - Earl Warren
"Restraint of discipline, emulation, examples of virtue and of justice, form the education of the world." - Edmund Burke
"War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert their natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in a hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very nature of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity, whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved." - Edmund Burke
"War in its fairest form implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice." - Edward Gibbon
"The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that or any other consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice, is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant." - Edward Gibbon
"Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food." - Elias Canetti
"The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race and that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"All other love is extinguished by self-love; beneficence, humanity, justice, philosophy, sink under it." - Epicurus NULL
"The beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy; for from prudence are spring all the other virtues, and it teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, nor, again, to live a life of prudence, honor and justice without living pleasantly. For the virtues are by nature bound up with the pleasant life, and the pleasant life is inseparable from them." - Epicurus NULL
"Virtue consisteth of three parts - temperance, fortitude, and justice." - Epicurus NULL
"Nothing is terrible, except fear itself... revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to week it out... Certainly, in taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince's part to pardon. This is certain, the man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well." - Francis Bacon
"In causes of life and death, judges ought (as far as the law permiteth) in justice to remember mercy; and to cast a severe eye upon the example, but a merciful eye upon the person." - Francis Bacon
"Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." - Francis Bacon
"If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us." - Francis Bacon
"It is not truth, justice, liberty, which men seek; they seek only themselves. And O that they knew how to seek themselves aright!" - Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
"An integral part of justice is the confidence which citizens have in it, and it is this which requires that proceedings shall be public." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are… most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they would respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and [they] have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The march of world history stands outside virtue, vice and justice." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Man is an animal, formidable both from his passions and his reasons; his passions often urging him to great evils, and his reason furnishing means to achieve them. To train this animal, and make him amenable to order, to inure him to a sense of justice and virtue, to withhold him from ill courses by fear, and encourage him in his duty by hopes, in short to fashion and model him for society, hath been the aim of civil and religious institutions; and, in all times, the endeavor of good and wise men. The aptest method for attaining this end hath been always judged a proper education." - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater." - George Bernard Shaw
"No body of men can be induced to do another man’s killing for him unless he can convince them that they may honorably do so. The percentage of blackguards and sadists who enjoy cruelty for its own sake have to pretend that they are patriots and ministers of justice to secure the toleration of their fellow citizens." - George Bernard Shaw
"Justice pleaseth few in their own house." - George Herbert
"As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality." - George Washington
"The instinct for justice, when equipped with all the resources of technology, is capable of laying waste to the earth itself." - Georges Bernanos
"Law and justice play no role in the relations of peoples of unequal strength." - Gustave Le Bon
"Democracy is based on the conviction that people have the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right to govern themselves with reason and justice." - Harry S. Truman
"Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice." - Harry S. Truman
"If peace teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restrain." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"The vision of a world community based on justice, not power, is the necessity of our age." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war." - Henry Steele Commager
"Mercy more becomes a magistrate than the vindictive wrath which men call justice." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Love is more just than justice." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Love is more than justice." - Henry Ward Beecher
"From their religious faith, the Founding Fathers enunciated the most fundamental law of human progress since the Sermon on the Mount, when they stated that man received from the Creator certain inalienable rights and that these rights should be protected from the encroachment of others by law and justice." -
"Lenity has almost always wisdom and justice on its side." - Hosea Ballou
"Democracy is not just a counting up of votes – it is a counting up of actions. Without those on the bottom acting out there desires for justice – as the government acts out its needs, and those with power and privilege act out theirs – the scales of democracy will be off. That is why civil disobedience is not just to be tolerated – if we are to have a truly democratic society it is a necessity." - Howard Zinn
"The unique ability of humans to imagine gives enormous power to idealism, an imagining of a better state of things not yet in existence. That power has been misused to send young men to war. But the power of idealism can also be used to attain justice, to end the massive violence of war." - Howard Zinn
"There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"Justice without wisdom is impossible." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained." - James A. Garfield
"Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial. Under the auspices of publicity, the cause in the court of law, and the appeal to the court of public opinion, are going on at the same time... It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security." - Jeremy Bentham