Injustice

"Just as the American colonials' consciousness expanded from rebelling against unfair taxation in the 1760s to wide noble revolutionary goals touching on the inherent rights of mankind, so the Whiskey Rebellion guerrillas took on broader themes as injustice increasingly framed their consciousness. Once you start seeing injustice in one place, it's like taking off blinders- you start to see injustice everywhere, and how it is all connected."

"Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, [had] famously argued that injustice is the surest path to the destruction of civilization. … He wrote, and I quote in summary: when rulers impose unjust taxes, confiscate property without right, or fabricate accusations, they erode trust. Once the people lose confidence in [worldly] justice, the state’s foundations crumble. Injustice, Ibn Khaldun declared, is not only morally wrong—it is a sociological poison. Thus, for him, peace was inseparable from justice. A community cannot live in harmony if its members are subjected to false accusations, economic exploitation, or denial of their rights. … When injustice becomes systemic […, the] society is harmed. Ibn Khaldun warned that injustice leads to decline because it breaks the moral contract between the rulers and the ruled. Citizens or communities that see their rights trampled lose confidence in [the] government, solidarity fractures, and the legitimacy of authority collapses. … peace cannot be proclaimed while injustice persists. Ignoring such injustices will court social unrest, spiritual alienation, and the corrosion of civil trust. Restoring justice, however, will rebuild peace—both within the affected community and within the larger society."

"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find... men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."

"Sheila had long ago decided that she’d spend her time productively, rather than wasting energy on dealing with perceived injustices located in her—or someone else’s—past."

"'But whom do I treat unjustly,' you say, 'by keeping what is my own?' Tell me, what is your own? What did you bring into this life? From where did you receive it? It is as if someone were to take the first seat in the theater, then bar everyone else from attending, so that one person alone enjoys what is offered for the benefit of all in common — this is what the rich do. They seize common goods before others have the opportunity, then claim them as their own by right of preemption. For if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need."

"The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not."

"INJUSTICE, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others and carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the back."

"When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour."

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted."

"We have failed to bring justice. We cannot build the future on injustice."

"Injustice has a very dangerous ripple effect that must be combated right from the beginning. Imagine society as a pond disturbed by a pebble thrown into its still waters. The ripples created by this disturbance represent the far-reaching consequences of injustice. When a group is denied basic rights or faces [unreasonable] discrimination, the impact extends beyond the immediate targets. A ripple effect ensues, affecting neighboring communities and eventually damaging the entire social landscape. Grave injustices go on persisting everywhere around the world, including in democracies. Even if it is to a lesser extent than in totalitarian, dictatorial or autocratic regimes, it should never be underestimated or disregarded. That is the reason why social justice is increasingly put at the centre of international, national and regional policy agendas."

"Saying "no" to injustice is the ultimate declaration of hope."

"If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine."

"Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary."

"First, then, a woman will or won’t, depend on ’t; If she will do ’t, she will; and there ’s an end on ’t. But if she won’t, since safe and sound your trust is, Fear is affront, and jealousy injustice."

"To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues."

"Intemperance is naturally punished with diseases; rashness, with mischance; injustice, with violence of enemies; pride, with ruin; cowardice, with oppression; and rebellion, with slaughter."

"Feeling that the world is wrong does not necessarily mean that we have a picture of a utopia to put in its place. Nor does is necessarily mean a romantic, some-day-my-prince-will-come idea that, although things are wrong now, one day we shall come to a true world, a promised land, a happy ending. We need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong."

"How unjust is Nemesis? How often does good come from evil and evil from good? Does not deceit often lead one to the pinnacle of success, while the reward for honesty and sober living is sometimes nothing but failure and despair?"

"We are raised to believe that breaking the law is wrong and following the law is right. But what if the law itself is a miscarriage of justice, crafted by those more interested in [keeping political power] than in [encouraging] fairness? …do we have no choice but to adhere to a system that is proven to be unjust? Or do we have the right to object? … One of the greatest dangers of a system that we can observe, is that [the] citizens come to accept the system's injustices as [a part of] the norm. Over time, they begin to believe that only the state apparatus [and all those who enforce its written rules and unwritten rules] can implement justice, and that questioning or opposing the justice system makes them [and others] criminals or bad citizens [or bad people]."

"…as Habermas would remind us, peace cannot be pursued in isolation from justice. It must be grounded in the ethical treatment of all citizens, including those who belong to spiritual minorities. … A society cannot credibly advocate for peace while tolerating injustice. It cannot build bridges with the world while burning bridges with its citizens. And it cannot claim moral leadership while denying moral redress."

"…abolishing unjust systems does not automatically abolish injustice. Because injustice is not only a matter of law. It is a matter of how bureaucrats interpret the law, how officials use their power, how institutions treat the people they are meant to serve."

"The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed."

"Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

"I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If he has a place and work for me—and I think He has—I believe I am ready."

"Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice."

"Avoid cruelty and injustice for, on the Day of Judgment, the same will turn into several darknesses; and guard yourselves against miserliness; for this has ruined nations who lived before you."

"In the name of God, I put my trust in God. O God, I seek refuge in Thee lest I stray or be led astray or cause injustice or suffer injustice or do wrong or have wrong done to me!"

"People, beware of injustice, for injustice shall be darkness on the Day of Judgment."

"According to Honneth, social struggles emerge when disrespect is experienced as a moral injustice rather than as mere misfortune. In this sense, Tai Ji Men’s resistance can be understood as a claim to dignity and to recognition as legitimate bearers of a form of life within the social order."

"India seems to have lost that urge to consistently relate to injustice as an assault on democracy. Be it plight of migrants or minorities, their failure to strike wider chord tells truths about us. [...] There was no public outcry over this human tragedy and the victims themselves chose to mostly suffer in silence. They may have grumbled, or cursed under their breath, but our democracy does not seem to have encouraged them to really assert or demand their rights. Not just migrants, minorities too have been subjected to the untold misery of being excluded from the idea of the public. And more routinely, women, rural poor, Dalits and Adivasis have been objects of humiliation."

"If we were to analyze the evil that human beings do, in search of its essence, one cogent conclusion to which we would surely arrive is that the very nature of human evil is injustice. Homicide, brutality, war, and theft are all faces of injustice. So are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Under one aspect or another, all crimes and capital sins that human beings can devise and perform subtract from and deny parts of the universal architecture of justice that governs the world as it should be. All human misdeeds are acts of injustice: toward God, fellow human beings, and nature. Injustice may then be considered the real essence of human evil, and the supreme evil of injustice brings about ruptures, breaks, and splits—in other words, the contrary of peace."

"Widespread injustice never fades away. It ferments and stinks and eventually bursts into bloody flowers."

"It is fair to assume that Parisians would not have stormed the Bastille, Gandhi would not have challenged the empire on which the sun used not to set, Martin Luther King would not have fought white supremacy in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’, without their sense of manifest injustices that could be overcome. They were not trying to achieve a perfectly just world (even if there were any agreement on what that would be like), but they did want to remove clear injustices to the extent they could."

"Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions of life. It carries in it the possibilities of disorder, for all tragic poets have something of the rebelliousness of Antigone. Goethe, on the contrary, loathed disorder. He once said that he preferred injustice, signifying by that cruel assertion not his support for reactionary political ideals, but his conviction that injustice is temporary and reparable whereas disorder destroys the very possibilities of human progress. Again, this is an anti-tragic view; in tragedy it is the individual instance of injustice that infirms the general pretence of order. One Hamlet is enough to convict a state of rottenness."

"Men's indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior."

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

"A promise which the promisor should reasonably expect to induce action or forbearance on the part of the promisee or a third person and which does induce such action or forbearance is binding if injustice can be avoided only by enforcement of the promise."

"Burning outside the fire is worse than burning inside [the fire]."