Top 40 Justice Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Never mistake law for justice. Justice is an ideal, and law is a tool.”

— L.E. Modesitt Jr.

2. “Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.”

— Blaise Pascal

3. “The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.”

— Plato

4. “In the struggle for justice, the only reward is the opportunity to be in the struggle. You can’t expect that you’re going to have it tomorrow. You just have to keep working on it.”

— Frederick Douglass

Also featured in: Struggle Quotes

5. “Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.”

— Woodrow Wilson

6. “When we all see justice, then we’ll all see peace!”

— Michael Franti

7. “Liberty, Humanity, Justice, Equality.”

— Susan B. Anthony

Also featured in: Quotes About Humanity

8. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

— Desmond Tutu

9. “You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.”

— Frederick Douglass

10. “The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.”

— Sigmund Freud

Also featured in: Firsts Quotes, Quotes About Civilization

11. “Punishment is justice for the unjust.”

— Saint Augustine

Also featured in: Philosophical Quotes

12. “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Also featured in: Quotes About Trust, Powerful Quotes

13. “Justice and truth are the common ties of society.”

— John Locke

14. “There is no peace without justice, and no justice without forgiveness.”

— Pope John Paul II

15. “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

— Howard Zinn

Also featured in: History Quotes, Moving Quotes

16. “The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.”

— Barack Obama

17. “Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.”

— Orson Welles

18. “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.”

— Francis Bacon

19. “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”

— Albert Camus

Also featured in: Country Quotes

20. “Freedom is incomplete without social justice.”

— Atal Bihari Vajpayee

21. “The best and only safe road to honor, glory, and true dignity is justice.”

— George Washington

22. “Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.”

— Desmond Tutu

Also featured in: Path Quotes

23. “Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are – to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.”

— Bell Hooks

24. “Nothing is worse than active ignorance.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

25. “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.”

— Aldous Huxley

26. “There is no justice in killing in the name of justice.”

— Desmond Tutu

27. “Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not “given”, it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice.”

— Aung San Suu Kyi

Also featured in: Sacrifice Quotes, Rights Quotes

28. “Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!”

— Terry Pratchett

29. “Forgiveness doesn’t diminish justice; it just entrusts it to God. He guarantees the right retribution.”

— Max Lucado

30. “The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.”

— Wendell Berry

31. “Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!”

— Mary Shelley

32. “It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible.”

— Thomas Paine

Also featured in: Evil Quotes

33. “You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.”

— John von Neumann

34. “I think justice is important because there are many injustices in the world and I hate injustice.”

— Michael Jackson

35. “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

36. “When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.”

— John F. Kennedy

Also featured in: Government Quotes

37. “Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yeild nothing on the plane of freedom.”

— Albert Camus

38. “Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood – the virtues that made America.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

39. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.”

— Frederick Douglass

40. “Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?”

— George Washington

41. “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Also featured in: Freedom Quotes, Quotes on Liberty