It is not what a lawyer tells me I MAY do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I OUGHT to do.
Source: Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)
Topic
Justice is one of the oldest and most contested ideas in human civilization — a concept every society invokes and almost none fully achieves. The quotes gathered here approach justice from philosophical, political, personal, and literary angles. Classical thinkers defined justice as giving each their due; later traditions expanded the conversation to ask who counts among the "each," what is actually owed, and who has the authority to decide. What runs through these diverse perspectives is a shared recognition that injustice is not merely inconvenient but corrosive — to individuals, to communities, and to the moral credibility of institutions. These reflections also probe the relationship between justice and mercy, between law and fairness, between formal equality and substantive equity. Whether you approach this topic as a student of political philosophy, someone navigating an immediate wrong, or a person trying to understand the moral structure of the world, these words engage the question at its full depth.
It is not what a lawyer tells me I MAY do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I OUGHT to do.
Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.
Law is common force organized to prevent injustice.
My own belief is that our cause, the cause of justice, and its supporters, will prove stronger in every emergency than the traitor and the foreigner.
There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable.
Whatsoever doth happen in the world, doth happen justly.
The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.
He who violates another's honor loses his own.
It has acted in direct opposition to its proper end; it has destroyed its own object.
It has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime, that it may punish it.
The law, then, is solely the organization of individual rights that existed before law.
Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.
What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea.