Justice Reform Quotes & Sayings

I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. — C.S. Lewis

The Liberal Democrat Party and the Conservative Party come at things very differently when it comes to Europe. When it comes to political reform, we have a much greater tradition in the Liberal Democrats of social justice and fairness than the Conservatives do. — Nick Clegg

We need to decouple the movement for comprehensive immigration reform and justice for immigrants from the legislative process and from the Democratic Party process. They are too linked. — Luis Gutierrez

The common law does not proceed by legislation, or by imposing directives and decrees on a reluctant population. It proceeds by resolving conflicts, and discovering the rules that are implicit in those conflicts and in the behaviour that gives rise to them. Common law is discovered law, and its principles are not imposed from above but extracted from below, by judges whose aim is to do justice in the individual case, rather than to reform the conduct of mankind. Its rights are not stated but implied, and they encapsulate a vision of individual freedom rather than a politics of collective conformity. The rights dreamed up in the European Courts, by judges who do not pay the cost of imposing them, are experiments in social engineering, rather than recognitions of individual sovereignty, and this is in no matter more evident than in those clauses that have imposed the mores of the elite on a reluctant residue of Christian believers, and which are now ubiquitous in our statutory law. — Roger Scruton

Speaker Boehner needs to understand the urgency for reform. Until the House passes a bill that includes a pathway to citizenship, we will continue to be in the streets, at town hall meetings and on the phones, demanding justice for the 11 million aspiring Americans in our country. — Eliseo Medina

The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone's sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice. — Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

We need first of all the reform of our justice system. We need reform of the education system, because of quality of education because of innovation and technology. And we need administrative reform. Too much bureaucracy. — Iveta Radicova

I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way. — Eric Holder

At this moment the phrase "police reform" has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies - the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects - are the product of democratic will. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Do you know what social justice is? Do you know what social reform is? I didn't either, but reform and social justice are what I intend to do. — Silvio Santos

On trade, our hypocrisy is at its most appalling. Trade reform isn't about charity, it's about justice, and this campaign, Trade Justice is an unstoppable idea. — Edward De Bono

The DOJ has employed these investigations in communities across our nation to reform serious patterns and practices of force, biased policing and other unconstitutional practices by law enforcement, i'm asking the Department of Justice to investigate if our police department has engaged in a pattern or practice of stops, searches or arrests that violate the fourth amendment. — Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

We are the in midst of a bipartisan moment as it relates to criminal justice reform and dealing with mass incarceration in America which disproportionately impacts the African-American community. — Hakeem Jeffries

I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum. — Cory Booker

I think one of the things that I don't think people focus on is that there are some red states that have done some really innovative things when it comes to criminal justice reform, including on rehabilitation, reentry efforts. I think one of the things that we have seen in that regard is that you save money. — Eric Holder

Got good news and bad news for you, Mr. President. The good news is that Chief Justice John Roberts just saved your legacy and, perhaps, your presidency by writing for the Supreme Court majority to rule health care reform constitutional. — Ron Fournier

It's important to remember, when we're out there aggressively working for reform, that, even if our particular issue doesn't get resolved, we are adding peace to the world. We have to do our best and at the same time give up all hope of fruition. — Pema Chodron

We (the left) have to be used to being a minority - a small minority - for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror-image delusions. It is important to stick to principles, even when some of them may be unpopular now for one reason or another. For example, there has been a tendency for some progressives to look at the power of the right, and say, "Well, all we can focus on is economic justice issues, because other things, whether they are abortion rights or drug law reform, will be less popular and more divisive". And I think that is wrong approach. There are certain core things we stand for, and these include both economic justice and civil liberties, which you can't back away from. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Every society has the criminals that it deserves. — Havelock Ellis

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. — Henry Louis Gates

Every dollar and every moment of care devoted to increasing the individual importance of people, all skill and training, all fine organization to humanize work, every increase of political expression, is a protection against idle use of our military power, against any attempt to convert legitimate and necessary preparation for defense into an instrument of conquest. It may be said with justice that the man is dangerous who talks loudly about military preparation and is uninterested in social reform. It is the people engaged in adding to the values of civilization who have earned the right to talk about its defense. — Franklin Foer

I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care. — Cory Booker

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform. — Derrick A. Bell

An educator ... a good one that is, inspires others to be even better than herself. — Jill Telford

My heart and passion has always been to reform the criminal justice system. I want to be a public servant, and I wanted to be a prosecutor because I felt it was the best way forward. — Marilyn Mosby

Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter's case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. — Bryan Stevenson

I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. — C.S. Lewis

Reform must come from within, not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue. — James Gibbons

No one who worked in "Corrections" appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf. — Piper Kerman

From 1801, Napoleon began an ambitious programme of civil reform to standardise law and justice, centralise education, introduce uniform weights and measures and a fully functioning internal market. That achievement alone makes him one of the giants of history. — Saul David

Much of the way food has been shaped and formed in prisons is due to the cultural thought about prisoners in general, and how they should be treated by society and by the state. Food in prison is a reflection of culture and cultural thinking about criminal justice and reform. — Erika Camplin

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress. It's coexistence or no existence. — Bertrand Russell

Suppose, in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man? — Arthur C. Clarke

The strength of the claims of formal justice, of obedience to system, clearly depend upon the substantive justice of institutions and the possibilities of their reform. — John Rawls

I encourage everyone to pay attention to the issues that matter to you, from jobs and the economy, to education and our schools, to criminal justice reform. Whatever it is that you care about, make sure you use your voice. — Two Chainz

Religion must be used in furthering great works of justice and reform. It must be used to establish right relations between different groups of men, and thus to make a reality of brotherhood. It must be used to abolish poverty, the breeding ground of all misery and crime, by distributing equably among men the abundance of the soil. And it must be used to get rid of war and to establish enduring peace. Here is the supreme test of the effectiveness of religion. — John Haynes Holmes