Quotes & Sayings About Injustice

Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established. — John Berger

I have not been deaf to truth" and "I have not winked at injustice. — Maulana Karenga

Who can describe the injustice and the cruelties that in the course of centuries the peoples of color of the world have suffered at the hands of Europeans? ... We and our civilization are burdened, really, with a great debt. We are not free to confer benefits on these men, or not, as we please; it is our duty. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement. — Albert Schweitzer

Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it. — Plato

I have to deplore the systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has continued to put out of sight our obligations to the Muhammadans. Surely they cannot be much longer hidden. Injustice founded on religious rancour and national conceit cannot be perpetuated forever. The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe. He has indelibly written it on the heavens as any one may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe. — John William Draper

Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution. — Theodore Parker

Enduring and forgiving are two different things. You must not forgive the cruelty of this world. It's our duty as human beings to be angry at injustice. But we must also endure it. Because someone must sever this chain of hatred. — Hiromu Arakawa

There is no greater injustice than to wring your profits from the sweat of another man's brow. — Abraham Lincoln

Authority founded on injustice is never of long duration. — Seneca The Younger

It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less. — Frederic Bastiat

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him. — E. M. Forster

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. — H.L. Mencken

[E]very human life is a reflection of divinity, and ... every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I can not but hate the prospect of slavery's expansion. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity. — Abraham Lincoln

It is better to protest than to accept injustice. — Rosa Parks

It is for real that injustice and oppression will not have the last word. There was a time when Hitler looked like he was going to vanquish all of Europe, and where is he now? — Desmond Tutu

The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also are best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). And it also becomes clearer and clearer that our best 'helpers' are the most fully human persons. What I may call the bodhisattvic path is an integration of self-improvement and social zeal, i.e., the best way to become a better 'helper' is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So one must and can do both simultaneously. — Abraham H. Maslow

Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren't Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?), — Howard Zinn

We've all had some level of injustice, whether 20 years in prison, or 20 minutes sitting in your car waiting for a police officer to determine your future. Or even a few moments in an elevator with some woman clutching her purse thinking you're going to rob her ¾ regardless of celebrity, that has happened to me. — Denzel Washington

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

Every social injustice is not only cruel, but it is economic waste. — William Feather

It would, I think, be hard for anyone to make the case that the United States is a just society or anything close to a just society. In America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. — Bernie Sanders

Wherever injustice occurs, we all need to be concerned. — Millicent Fenwick

To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. Once must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society. — Pedro Arrupe

I'm also hurt by injustice. But don't forget that we have passed through hell ,and remained sane people inspite of everything.This is our victory. — Alija Izetbegovic

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered. — Thomas Pynchon

A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love. — Sigmund Freud

A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn't find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to this world - this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me. — Haruki Murakami

It ought to concern every person, because it is a debasement of our common humanity. It ought to concern every community, because it tears at our social fabric. It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets. It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime. I'm talking about the injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name
modern slavery. — Barack Obama

But that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence. — Leo Tolstoy

To the ideal of high consumption and the downgrading of spiritual values corresponds a conception of injustice that centers exclusively on the problem of consumption; and equality in consumption cannot be achieved except by violence. — Jacques Ellul

King and Gandhi had found a way to use aggressive impulses to resist injustice without hurting others. Where did the aggression go? The answer, as King would later tell Poussaint, was this: into the courage needed to resist without fighting back physically... — S. Nassir Ghaemi

It is unjust, but only Christlike, to suffer persecution for doing what is right. — Joyce Rachelle

Oh! if, when we oppress and grind our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in imagination, the deep testimony of the dead men's voices, which no power can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and injustice: the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong: that each day's life brings with it! — Charles Dickens

While we lament the apparent injustice of pain and suffering, how often do we forget that every good thing in a fallen world is wholly a gift of God's mercy and grace. — Matt Chandler

Family values stand up to injustice and power outside the household. — Ralph Nader

school people must not fall into the trap of thinking that early preparation for an unjust world requires early exposure to injustice — Oakes Jeannie

The King can do no wrong; he cannot constitutionally be supposed capable of injustice. — John Nichol

I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures? — Thomas Jefferson

It is evil things that we will be fighting against-brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution-and against them I am certain that the right will prevail. — Neville Chamberlain

At its heart, socialism is about the creation of a new society, built from the bottom up, through the struggles of ordinary working people against exploitation, oppression, and injustice - one that eliminates profit and power as the prime goals of life, and instead organizes our world around the principles of equality, democracy, and freedom. The — Alan Maass

It is time for the international community to work for the creation of an independent Kurdistan as they did once for the Jews after the Holocaust. The current war against ISIS, which is perceived by many as World War Three, can be compared to World War Two. After horrible wars, great changes can be brought about for those who have suffered extreme injustice. — Widad Akreyi

As a democratic society, Malawi has a moral obligation to ensure that each and every injustice, whether through acts of commission or omission, is met with deliberate and tangible action. — Joyce Banda

We who preach and write, do so in a manner different from which the Scriptures have been written. We write while we make progress.We learn something new every day. We speak as we still knock for understanding ... If anyone criticizes me when I have said what is right, he does me an injustice. But I would be more angry with the one who praises me and takes what I have written for Gospel truth than I would be with the one who criticizes me unfairly. — Saint Augustine

Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world. — Albert Ellis

The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes. — Margaret Mead

I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest - a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low. I live in calm, looking to the end. — Charlotte Bronte

Earthly providence is a travesty of justice on any other theory than that it is a preliminary stage, which is to be followed by rectifications. Either there must be a future, or consummate injustice sits upon the throne of the universe. This is the verdict of humanity in all the ages. — Randolph Sinks Foster

May humanity replace hate,injustice & tyranny with peace,love and unity for all nations! May we the citizens of the beautiful earth ... see war NO more! — Timothy Pina

Simple life Ethos
If you must judge. Let your moral beacon guide you to a decision you can live with,
If you feel generous, give with humility so others could live with dignity,
If you became aware of injustice, your inaction or silence are part of it,
Living life without courage, is like living without honour,
If your arrogance started to control your behavior, then it's time for you to stratify to heaven where there are no earthly human beings
Never live behind the rocks. Always move to find comfort in brighter places, and
Always deem yourself to be courageous when others call upon you....... — Husam Wafaei

It is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. Strangely — Viktor E. Frankl

Extreme justice is often injustice. — Jean Racine

If thou sustain injustice, console thyself; the true unhappiness is in doing it — Democritus

When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection. — Peter Hans Kolvenbach

Change isn't optional, and creation isn't something that happened a long time ago and then ended. It's ongoing, and we are invited to be a part of it. The question for us is 'what will we create in this new day?' How will we make it count? How will we nourish the things that matter, and stand in the way of injustice in the small ways that add up to the arc of history? You are invited to participate in the creation of this day ... — David LaMotte

I'm motivated by injustice, which is embedded and constant and wrong - not by a vernacular soundboard. — Amy Richards

The happiest people I've ever met, regardless of their profession, their social standing, or their economic status, are people that are fully engaged in the world around them. The most fulfilled people are the ones who get up every morning and stand for something larger than themselves. They are the people who care about others, who will extend a helping hand to someone in need or will speak up about an injustice when they see it. — Wilma Mankiller

What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books. — Christopher Isherwood

Whoever does wrong, wrongs himself; whoever does injustice, does it to himself, making himself evil. — Marcus Aurelius

I can say it, but it doesn't seem convincing to most people. I can call it an 'injustice,' but that doesn't always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words that are equal to the pain of the poor are pretty easily discredited. A quarter of the truth, stated with lots of indirection, is regarded as more seemly.

Even when people do accept the idea of 'injustice,' there are ways to live with it without it causing you to change a great deal in your life. A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication here. the stile is, 'Oh yes. We know all that. So tell us something new.' There's a kind of cultivated weariness in this. Talking about injustice, I am told, is 'tiresome' unless you do it in a way that sounds amusing. — Jonathan Kozol

Law and freedom must be indivisible partners. For without law, there can be no freedom, only choas and disorder; and without freedom, law is but a cynical veneer for injustice and oppression. — Ronald Reagan

Not every bad break is negative in the long term; not every problem is a bona fide injustice; and not every injustice is major when juxtaposed against the millions of injustices that occur daily throughout the world. — Robert Ringer

An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or loved. But as long as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the damage he sustains is essentially spiritual, not physical; in such a case, the victim alone has the power and the responsibility of healing his wounds. He remains free: free to think, to learn from his experiences, to look elsewhere for human relationships; he remains free to start afresh and to pursue his happiness. — Leonard Peikoff

The ugliness that man can do to man might cast a shadow between you and the certainty of the justice and mercy God can do to him hereafter. It takes half a lifetime to reach the spot where eternity is always visible, and the crude injustice of the hour shrivels out of sight. — Ellis Peters

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P — Susan Sontag

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler. — Georges Bernanos

124. And whoever does righteous good deeds, male or female, and is a true believer in the Oneness of Allaah (Muslim), such will enter Paradise and not the least injustice, even to the size of a Naqeera (speck on the back of a date-stone), will be done to them. — Anonymous

I hadn't fought enough for the injustice of the Apartheid. — Arnon Milchan

The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity's liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of "the Good" or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word "Christian" with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings. — James H. Cone

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Men's and nations' finest hour consist of those moments when extraordinary challenge is met by extraordinary response. Hence in those darkest hours, we must light our individual candles rather than vying with others to call attention to the enveloping darkness. Our indignation about injustice should lead to illumination, for if it does not, we are only adding to the despair-and the moment of gravest danger is when there is so little light that darkness seems normal! — Neal A. Maxwell

I do not know what, in the end, makes a person who they are. If we're all born one way, or if we only arrive there after as series of chioces. The bible claims that the wicked act on their own desires and impulses, because God is good, only good, and He would never compel a soul to wickedness. That I'm supposed to count on justice in the next life, even if I can't have it in this one. — Alexandra Bracken

All that the law can do is to shape things so that no injustice shall be done by one to the other, and that each man shall be given the first chance to show the stuff that is in him. — Theodore Roosevelt

And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.'
Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it. — Vikram Seth

An injustice to one is a threat made to all — Baron De Montesquieu

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. — Jeffrey K. Smith

I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice. — Marguerite Duras

The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have studied the character and personality of these men, or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the highest tribute. Could anyone assume that these men had advised violence, or even approved of the acts? Certainly not. Theirs was the attitude of the social student, of the man who knows that beyond every violent act there is a vital cause. — Emma Goldman

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice. — Johnnetta B. Cole

It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too — Sigmund Freud

The gifts that one receives for giving are so immeasurable that it is almost an injustice to accept them. — Rod McKuen

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice. — Montesquieu

We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured
by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been. — Solon

Survival rates for breast cancer are relatively good, but Krishnan has been around illness enough to know there is usually a cruel injustice about the way it strikes. Cranky patients defy the odds, while the kind ones, the ones who bake him cookies or bring him tomatoes from their garden, always seem to die early. Mortality rates utilize the law of averages without consideration for who is most deserving. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres. — Marguerite Yourcenar

If God exists, and I truly don't believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created the confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here. — Paulo Coelho

I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself. — Emily Bronte

Suffering is a big informer, a big catalyst for creation. You take your sadness, your despair, your sense of injustice, and you put it in your work. — Madonna Ciccone

In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. — Bryan Stevenson

He who bears injustice alone is terrible to behold. — Friedrich Nietzsche

That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man. — Henry George

Injustice against some...is injustice against all! — Timothy Pina

All free communities have both been more exempt from social injustice and crime, and have attained more brilliant prosperity, than any others, or than they themselves after they have lost their freedom. — John Stuart Mill

Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort
a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance. — Melanie Joy

Making a judgment, taking a stand and then acting against an injustice or acting to support excellence is the stuff of the everyman hero. If you are an aspiring artist and you wish to avoid "judgments," you'll find that you have nothing to say. — Steven Pressfield

There are doubtless those who would wish to lock up all those who suspected of terrorist and other serious offences and, in the time-honored phrase, throw away the key. But a suspect is by definition a person whom no offence has been proved. Suspicions, even if reasonably entertained, may prove to be misplaced, as a series of tragic miscarriages of justice has demonstrated. Police officers and security officials can be wrong. It is a gross injustice to deprive of his liberty for significant periods a person who has committed no crime and does not intend to do so. No civilized country should willingly tolerate such injustices. — Tom Bingham

Why do you suppose they made you king in the first place?' I ask him. 'Not for your benefit, but for theirs. They meant you to devote your energies to making their lives more comfortable, and protecting them from injustice. So your job is to see that they're all right, not that you are - just as a shepherd's job, strictly speaking, is to feed his sheep, not himself. — Thomas More

If one could be enraged by the loss of a favorite sports team, shouldn't his anger rise at the entrenchment of a scheme whereby no innocent person was safe, where self-determination was a crime punished by the vagaries of an opaque & impervious justice system? — Ausma Zehanat Khan

Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done — William Faulkner