Quotes on justice
Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
Brandeis, Louis D.
An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men.
Silone, Ignazio
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
Ford, Henry
Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please.
Field, David Dudley
The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.
Hughes, Charles Evans
Rather let the crime of the guilty go unpunished than condemn the innocent.
I, Justinian
In keeping people straight, principle is not as powerful as a policeman.
Hermant, Abel
The more laws the more offenders.
Fuller, Thomas
I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.
Richards, Keith
The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Frost, Robert
Poverty is the mother of crime.
Aurelius, Marcus
A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.
Scott, Howard
Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.
Hocking, William Ernest
Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices.
Argo, Edgar
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
Stirner, Max
It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
Burke, Edmund
The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.
Blessington, Lady Marguerite
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
Wilde, Oscar
One of irony's greatest accomplishments is that one cannot punish the wrongdoing of another without committing a wrongdoing himself.
Anonymous
In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
Bruce, Lenny
Hug a police officer. It's the law!
Unknown, Author
The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want.
Aristotle
Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.
Phillips, Wendell