John Adams [1770]: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” [in defense of British soldiers, Boston Massacre trial{
Clarence Darrow [1920}: “As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.”
Ralph W. Emerson [1860]: “The judge weighs the arguments and puts a brave face on the matter, and since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice and given satisfaction to the community.”
Henry Ford, attributed: “Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.”
Henry George [1884]: “That justice is the highest quality in the moral hierarchy I do not say, but that it is the first. That which is above justice must be based on justice, and include justice, and be reached through justice.”
Learned Hand, “Giuseppi-Walling opinion [1944]: “There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally…As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne [1850}: “Generosity is the flower of justice.”
Robert G. Ingersoll [1883]: “We must remember then, that we have to make judges out of men, and that by being made judges their prejudices are not diminished and their intelligence is not increased.”
John Jay, attributed: “Justice is always the same, whether it be due from one man to a million, or from a million to one man.”
Thomas Jefferson [1816]: “I believe ….that [justice] is instinct and innate, that the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. [1963]: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Abraham Lincoln, attributed: “He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then, when sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.” [also expressed by Artemus Ward]
James R. Lowell [1876]: “Exact justice is commonly more merciful in the long run than pity, for it tends to foster in men those stronger qualities which make them good citizens.”
James Madison [The Federalist, #5l]: “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”
Reinhold Niebuhr [1944]: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Theodore Roosevelt [1913]: “Our judges have been, on the whole, both able and upright public servants….But their whole training and the aloofness of their position on the bench prevent their having, as a rule, any real knowledge of, or understanding sympathy with, the lives and needs of the ordinary hard-working toiler.”
William H. Seward [1850]: “There is a higher law than the Constitution.”
Henry D. Thoreau [1849]: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison.”
George Washington [1789}: “The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government.”
Woodrow Wilson [1916]: “Justice has nothing to do with expediency. Justice has nothing to do with any temporary standard whatever. It is rooted and grounded in the fundamental instincts of humanity>”
note: again we’ve provided the thoughts from “The Harper Book of American Quotations,” by Carruth and Ehrlich.
With Justice For All 