Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.

Some people will have to be afraid. Those who plunder the nation, deliver injustice, will have to feel scared of me. And I am not afraid of admitting this. Government cannot be so lenient that it forgives them.

The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Today, India is a nuclear weapons state.

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.

My mother came from India to go to the University of California, Berkeley.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‚suspects.‘

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.

I don’t think that a Justice should have uppermost in her mind, ‚A Democratic president appointed me, so I must leave to be sure that another Democratic president can appoint my successor.‘

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

So what we’re talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we’re facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

A private soldier has as much right to justice as a major-general.

The progress of India is the destiny of one-sixth of humanity. And it will also mean a world more confident of its prosperity and more secure about its future.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

I’m a Bangalore boy.

I am a just man.

I am a strong believer that without justice, there is no peace. No lasting peace, anyway.

There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

After a century of trying, we declared that healthcare in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody. After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil. We doubled our production of clean energy. We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother – my mother’s mother – who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

More law, less justice.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

One of the things that I have admired about India is the spiritualism of the people.

Much of India that we dream of still lies ahead of us: housing, power, water and sanitation for all; bank accounts and insurance for every citizen; connected and prosperous villages; and, smart and sustainable cities.

A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

Violent means will give violent freedom. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.

Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses.

It’s annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

I’ve had two cancer bouts in my years on the Court, and the first one, Justice O’Connor told me, ‚Now, you do the chemotherapy on Friday because you’ll get over it during the weekend and you can be back in court on Monday.‘

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

Racism is real in this country.

I love being in a courtroom.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.

When I took over as president, I studied the Constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realised that it does not prevent the president of India from giving the nation a vision. So when I went and presented this vision in Parliament and in legislative assemblies; everyone welcomed it, irrespective of party affiliations.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.