Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

Freedom is not enough.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius‘ wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty.

It’s hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don’t have executions.

On wrongs swift vengeance waits.

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don’t buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

If you’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

You can’t take care of charity unless you take care of yourself first.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty.

I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

Justice means minding one’s own business and not meddling with other men’s concerns.

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

I might talk about killing people, but that doesn’t mean I do it.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.

For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, and love the offender, yet detest the offence?

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history.

Anti-Semitism is real in this country.

It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

It is right to give every man his due.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.