Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses.

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

Justice is truth in action.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

We want justice, but at the same time, we gotta love and come together and bring unity, and I feel it’s gonna happen.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.

Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the oppressed, and delivering justice to the violent, they are making America more secure.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

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.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

We tell lies, yet it is easy to show that lying is immoral.

Saints need sinners.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

Abortion is clearly wrong.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

Lawless are they that make their wills their law.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

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.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone’s life.

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.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.