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Justice is a concept involving the fair, moral, and impartial treatment of all persons. In its most general sense, it means according individuals what they actually deserve or merit, or are in some sense entitled to. Justice is a particularly foundational concept within most systems of "law". From the perspective of pragmatism, it is the name for a fair result.

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  • The blessings we associate with a life of refinement and culture can be made universal. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

  • Liberty, equality — bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.
    • Henri-Frédéric Amiel, undated entry of December 1863 or early 1864, in Amiel's Journal : The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel as translated by Humphry Ward (1893), p. 215


  • Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
    • Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics (ca. 325 BC) Book II

  • Justice and equity are neither absolutely identical nor generically different. ... If they are different, either the just or the equitabe is not good; if both are good, they are the same thing. ... For equity, while superior to one sort of justice, is itself just ... Justice and equity are therefore the same thing, and both are good, though equity is the better.
    The source of the difficulty is that equity, though just, is not legal justice, but a rectification of legal justice. The reason for this is that law is always a general statement, yet there are cases which it is not possible to cover in a general statement.
    • Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics (ca. 325 BC) Book V

  • The aim of justice is, as the Romans used to say, to give each his due, and in order for each to be given what is his, it is necessary that it already belong to him; to "give", in this sense, means to protect the right of possession. Each man gets "what belongs to him" in the course of voluntary exchanges that constitute the economic process, and, by virtue of the operation of the market, each receives for his contribution, precisely the amount that will impel him to increase the supply of the most urgently demanded commodities… Only when each man thereby gets what belongs to him, and someone wants to take it away from him, does a question of justice arise.
    • Faustino Ballve in "What Economics is Not About" in Essentials of Economics : A Brief Survey of Principles and Policies (1963), as translated by Arthur Goddard

  • Shalt thou reign, because thou closest thyself in cedar? Did not thy father eat and drink, and do judgment and justice, and then it was well with him?


  • Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself, but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.
    Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe to myself. What would you think of me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?

  • Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
    • Frederick Douglass Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886)

  • A just city should favour justice and the just, hate tyranny and injustice, and give them both their just desserts.
    • al-Farabi, quoted and translated by Gibb, H. et al. (eds.) (1991) 'Mazalim' in The Dictionary of Islam vol. IV Leiden: Brill

  • Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus.

  • The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
    • Variant: How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!
    • Anatole France Le Lys Rouge (The Red Lily), ch. 7 (1894)

  • We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.
    • Hierocles, as quoted in Ladies Companion Vol. XIII (May - October 1840) edited by William W. Snowden

  • Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward". Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.
    For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love". Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.
    • Carter Heyward, in Our Passion for Justice : Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation (1984)

  • Justice is a constant and perpetual will to render to everyone that which is his own.
    • Justinian, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 361.

  • True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1955 responding to an accusation that he was "disturbing the peace" by his activism during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, as quoted in Let the Trumpet Sound : A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr (1982) by Stephen B. Oates

  • Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.


  • I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
    • Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Lincoln Memorial (1882), edited by Osborn Oldroyd

  • Anyone who recognizes the eudemonistic character of all ethical valuation is exempt from further discussion of ethical Socialism. For such a one the Moral does not stand outside the scale of values which comprises all values of life. For him no moral ethic is valid per se. He must first be allowed to inquire why it is so rated. He can never reject that which has been recognized as beneficial and reasonable simply because a norm, based on some mysterious intuition, declares it to be immoral—a norm the sense and purpose of which he is not entitled even to investigate. His principle is not fiat iustitia, pereat mundus, (let justice be done, though the world perish), but fiat iustitia, ne pereat mundus (let justice be done, lest the world perish).

  • Normal concepts of fairness and justice can be relevant only if susceptible to being assigned economic value.
    • John Murphy, in the introduction to the 12th edition of Street on Torts (2007) concerning certain lawyers' approach to Tort law.

  • Conscience is the chamber of justice.
    • Origen, quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 46


  • He shook his head. "There's no justice."
    Death sighed. he said,

  • We have made you ruler in the land; so judge between men with justice and do not follow desire.


The higher judge is the universal and absolute Spirit alone — the World-Spirit ... The relation of one particular State to another presents, on the largest possible scale, the most shifting play of individual passions, interests, aims, talents, virtues, power, injustice, vice, and mere external chance. ... Out of this dialectic rises the universal Spirit, the unlimited World-Spirit, pronouncing its judgement — and its judgement is the highest — upon the Nations of the World's History; for the History of the World is the World's court of justice.

  • Justice of the world is in its creativity, in solving problems, in our activity and struggle. While I am alive there is the possibility to act, to strive for happiness, this is justice.

  • Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
    • Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a letter to three students (October 1967), published in "The Struggle Intensifies" in Solzhenitsyn : A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz

  • Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

  • Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
    • Gloria Steinem, in Open Secrets : Ninety-four Women in Touch with Our Time (1972) by Barbaralee Diamonstein

  • It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
    • Earl Warren, in "The Law and the Future" in Fortune magazine (November 1955)

  • You condemn on hearsay evidence alone, your sins increase.
    • Anonymous African proverb, quoted in Apropos of Africa : Sentiments of Negro American Leaders on Africa from the 1800s to the 1950s (1969) edited by Adelaide Cromwell Hill and Martin Kilson


  • At some time, here or hereafter, every account must be settled, and every debt paid in full.
    • J. H. Vincent, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 361.


The Circle of Justice

There are numerous versions and translations of statements referred to as "The Circle of Justice". Ibn Khaldun in the Muqaddimah states that it originates with Khosrau I based on statements of Aristotle.

  • The world is a garden the fence of which is the dynasty.
    The dynasty is an authority through which life is given proper behavior.
    Proper behavior is a policy directed by the ruler.
    The ruler is an institution supported by the soldiers.
    The soldiers are helpers who are maintained by money.
    Money is sustenance brought together by the subjects.
    The subjects are servants who are protected by justice.
    Justice is something familiar (harmonious) and through it, the world persists.
    The world is a garden... and then it begins again ... they are held together in a circle with no definite beginning or end.

  • No one is fit to govern, save he who is mild without weakness and strong without harshness. They used to say :
    There can be no government without men,
    No men without money,
    No money without prosperity,
    And no prosperity without justice and good administration.
    • The "Circle of Justice" as quoted in Human Rights in Islam (1980) by Parveen Shaukat Ali, p. 72

  • The world is a garden for the state to master.
    The state is power supported by the law.
    The law is policy administered by the king.
    The king is a shepherd supported by the army.
    The army are assistants provided for by taxation.
    Taxation is sustenance gathered by subjects.
    Subjects are slaves provided for by justice.
    Justice is that by which the rectitude of the world subsists.
    • The Counsels of Alexander, presented to the Timurid prince Baysunghur (1495 - 1497). Translated and quoted in Timur and the Princely Vision : Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (1989) by Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry

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  • The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.



  • The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.

  • A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

  • Justice doesn't mean the bad guy goes to jail, it just means that someone pays for the crime

  • Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

  • Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished; the others can only be hurt.

  • We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

  • I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream — a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

  • If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.


  • Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

  • There is a thin line between justice and revenge, though they are not mutually exclusive.
    • Ryan Mclean

  • Nor yet are they to be submitted to the mere men of the law; for these are necessarily trained to endeavor to make wrong appear right, or to involve both in a maze of intricacies, and to legalized injustice.

  • When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
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