Great Quotations on Truth & Justice

Great is truth, and it prevails.-- III Esdras 4:41

Out of the mouths of babes comes truth.-- Old Testament, Psalm 8:1-2

Truth shines in the dark.-- Welsh proverb

Slogans are both exciting and comforting, but some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words and phrases.-- James Bryant Conant

Conscience is the chamber of justice.-- Origen

I love agitation and investigation and glory and defending unpopular truth against popular error.-- James Garfield

...facts exist independent of our wishes, and responsible moral thinking begins when we try to see things as they are.-- James Rachels

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.-- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

The fundamental idea in the concept of justice is fairness.-- John Rawls

When a man thinks he is reading the character of another, he is often unconsciously betraying his own.-- Joseph Farrell

We refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Life's unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves.-- Hubert Humphrey

American bankers are laundering huge amounts of drug money, everybody knows it: how many bankers are in jail? None; but if a black kid gets caught with a joint, he goes to jail.-- Noam Chomsky

There wasn't a law that said that the king and all of the nobles had to run everything, and there isn't a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically; they can be changed historically.-- Noam Chomsky

Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of someone else's description of reality.-- Howard Zinn

The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies.-- Howard Zinn

It is the poor, the nonwhite, the nonconformists, the powerless who go to prison while corporate thieves and government architects of war remain at large.-- Howard Zinn

No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.-- Helen Keller

The truth shall make us free. The truth shall make us free. The truth shall make us free someday. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, The truth shall make us free someday.-- Charles Tindley

This is the true face of the global economy: labor has been erased. Wal-Mart is larger than the economy of 161 countries...It was 104 degrees in the factory...housed in rat-infested dormitories. The real face of Wal-Mart is this thirteen-year-old girl in Bangladesh. She only had two days off in the last four months. She's never ridden a bicycle. Seven cents an hour!-- Charlie Kernaghan

Cheap truth is like junk food. It comes in pretty packages, and you can place a take-out order, but it loses so much flavor by the time you get it home.-- Clint Weyand

When the fox preaches, look to your geese.-- German proverb

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.-- Haile Selassie

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil. -- Hannah Arendt

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.-- Harry S. Truman

It is vital that people be presented with the truth. Today more than ever we need what Einstein referred to as "a chain reaction of awareness."-- Helen Caldicott

Law never made men a whit more just.-- Henry David Thoreau

There is justice in the world, but it is blind.-- Lithuanian proverb

Poverty is the mother of crime.-- Marcus Aurelius

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide awake. But this wide awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.-- Octavio Paz

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The warden says, "The exit is sold: If you want a way out, silver and gold..."-- Paul Hewson
Laws go where dollars please.-- Portuguese proverb

Laws are like spiders' webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.-- Solon

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.-- Walt Whitman