This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The contempt of riches in the philosophers was a concealed desire of revenging on fortune the injustice done to their merit, by despising the good she denied them." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity." - Edmund Burke
"Fraud is the ready minister of injustice." - Edmund Burke
"The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice, and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man." - Edmund Burke
"I have no sympathy with the old idea that children owe such immense gratitude to their parents that they can never fulfill their obligations to them. I think the obligation is all on the other side. Parents can never do too much for their children to repay them for the injustice of having brought them into the world, unless they have insured them high moral and intellectual gifts, fine physical health, and enough money and education to render life something more than one careless struggle for necessaries." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"If a man meets with injustice, it is not required that he shall not be roused to meet it; but if he is angry after he has had time to think upon it, that is sinful. The flame is not wrong, but the coals are." - Henry Ward Beecher
"One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free." -
"If we do justice to our brother, even though we may not like him, we will come to love him; but if we do injustice to him because we do not love him we shall come to hate him." - John Ruskin
"Do justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not), and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him because you don’t love him, and you will come to hate him." - John Ruskin
"Justice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation, than any others; though particular cases may occur in which some other social duty is so important, as to overrule any one of the general maxims of justice. Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical practitioner. In such cases, as we do not call anything justice which is not a virtue, we usually say, not that justice must give way to some other moral principle, but that what is just in ordinary case is, by reason of that other principle, not just in the particular case. By this useful accommodation of language, the character of indefeasibility attributed to justice is kept up, and we are saved from the necessity of maintaining that there can be laudable injustice." - John Stuart Mill
"Prosperity, obtained through truth and righteousness, is built on a sure rock. Happiness derived from falsehood, injustice and lust, is built on sand." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Extreme justice is extreme injustice." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"When I pray for something, I do not pray; when I pray for nothing I really pray… To pray for anything except God might be called idolatry or injustice." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"Go out and get interested in the human problems that are everywhere around us. Help to improve the human lot. This service of love is perhaps the healthiest attitude in this world. It puts one into the main stream of the human race, where the profound problems re, and as one participates and gets involved and learns to know people and they him, one is loving and being loved and life becomes good - very good. Love is never a soft, genial attitude, indeed it is far from it. For example, when you really love the poor and underprivileged, you will get and fight for better conditions for all men. The fight is often against prejudice and entrenched greed, and it is no easy struggle to overcome these. But love is tough and never gives up as long as one of God’s children is the victim of injustice and mistreatment." - Norman Vincent Peale
"He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it." - Plato NULL
"Not only custom but nature also affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality." - Plato NULL
"All men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice." - Plato NULL
"Of all the things of a man’s soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil." - Plato NULL
"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in his duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself, which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? The debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of the rest or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance... Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world that yields most painfully to change." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men moved the world, and so can we all." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"Laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws and to perpetuate injustice through inaction." - Shirley Chisholm
"Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"To do… injustice to another is a far greater evil for the doer of the injustice than it is for the victim." - Socrates NULL
"A just war is in the long run far better for a nation’s soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence toward wrong or injustice. Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war is far better than never to have fought at all." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Rigid justice is the greatest injustice." - Thomas Fuller
"The object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty." -
"If oppression and wrong should gain the ascendancy, and injustice stalk abroad in the land, and all else fail him; nevertheless his humblest roof, and all things that are sheltered beneath it, would find, somehow, someway, a final refuge and protection in the Supreme Court of the United States." - Edward John Phelps
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them." - Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
"The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order." - Gustavo Gutiérrez
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. " - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
"Justice is rather the activity of truth, than a virtue in itself. Truth tells us what is due to others, and justice renders that due. Injustice is acting a lie." - Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford
"The response to war is to live like brothers and sisters. The response to injustice is to share. The response to despair is a limitless trust and hope. The response to prejudice and hatred is forgiveness. To work for community is to work for humanity. To work for peace is to work for a true political solution; it is to work for the Kingdom of God. It is to work to enable every one to live and taste the secret joys of the human person united to the eternal." - Jean Vanier
"Each person possesses and inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising" - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
"Our history is the most emphatic testimony that injustice to some men spells the doom of all men. Prejudice is like a hydra, a monster which has many heads, an evil which requires many efforts to overcome." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other. " - John Stuart Mill
"There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness." - Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver
"I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity." - Lucretia Mott, fully Lucretia Coffin Mott
"Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent." - Lucretia Mott, fully Lucretia Coffin Mott
"Shame is a secret pride; and pride is an error with regard to one's own worth, and an injustice with regard to what one has a mind to appear to others" - Madame de Lambert, fully Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert
"I choose love. No occasion justifies hatred; no injustice warrants bitterness, I choose love. Today I will love God and what God loves." - Max Lucado
"If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory." - Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo