Quotes about Justice

• It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
• Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.
• Justice is open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz Hotel.
• Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. 
• Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely. 
• An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men. 
• When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. 
• A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
• This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice. 
• The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs.
• Justice is incidental to law and order.
• Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices.
• Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious.  We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
• Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
• No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is.
• Somebody recently figured out that we have 35 million laws to enforce the ten commandments.
• I've never had a problem with drugs.  I've had problems with the police.
• There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.
• In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
• Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms.  They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice.
• If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers in the first place.
• It's strange that men should take up crime when there are so many legal ways to be dishonest.
• Hunger makes a thief of any man. 
• Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
• But how is this legal plunder to be identified?  Quite simply.  See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.  See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
• The more laws the more offenders.
• Law: the only game where the best players get to sit on the bench.
• It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any.
• Law never made men a whit more just. 
• If you don't know there's a trampoline in the room, you're not going to dust the ceiling for prints. 
• Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
• The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.
• The jury, passing on the prisoner's life, May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two Guiltier than him they try.
• In keeping people straight, principle is not as powerful as a policeman.
• When there's a single thief, it's robbery.  When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation.
• I'm convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal second base than an automobile.
• We don't give our criminals much punishment, but we sure give 'em plenty of publicity.
• Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.
• Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
• One of irony's greatest accomplishments is that one cannot punish the wrongdoing of another without committing a wrongdoing himself.
• Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
• Poverty is the mother of crime.
• When I see the Ten Most Wanted Lists... I always have this thought:  If we'd made them feel wanted earlier, they wouldn't be wanted now.
• 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.
• It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. 
• 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.
• Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer.  But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master.
• Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts.
• The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.
• It is not a Justice System.  It is just a system. 
• War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
• Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
• A rule that cannot be bent will certainly be broken. 
• Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.
• Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.
• An appeal... is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.
• Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.
• Law is not justice and a trial is not a scientific inquiry into truth.  A trial is the resolution of a dispute.
• It is easier to commit murder than to justify it.
• The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want.
• Corn can't expect justice from a court composed of chickens.
• Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
• The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
• The houses of lawyers are roofed with the skins of litigants.
• The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be.
• Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
• Just because the power is out doesn't mean we unplug the constitution.
• A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.
• 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.
• We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?
• A lawyer is a gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it for himself.
• A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
• The United States is a nation of laws:  badly written and randomly enforced.
• Rather let the crime of the guilty go unpunished than condemn the innocent.
• Judge:  a law student who marks his own papers.
• Thieves for their robbery have authority When judges steal themselves.
• I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
• The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.
• Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth!  They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government.
• 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.
• There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court.
• If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.
• It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.
• It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.
• The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime.  Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime.  It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
• The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime. 
• Having your fate rest in the hands of a jury is the same as entrusting yourself to surgery with a mentally retarded doctor. 
• Good lawyers know the law; great lawyers know the judge.
• The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits. 
• Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained.  True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests.  In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society. 
• Hug a police officer.  It's the law!
• 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.
• Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes.  The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.  As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort - as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.
• Every crime is born of necessity.  If you want less crime, you must change the conditions.  Poverty makes crime.  Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal.  And what do you do with him?  You punish him.  Why not punish a man for having consumption?  The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical.  What do you do with the criminal?  You send him to the penitentiary.  Is he made better?  Worse.  The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him.  You mark him.  You put him in stripes.  At night you put him in darkness.  His feeling for revenge grows.  You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to.