Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it’s a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you’re an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you’re religious, there’s a mystery left there.

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

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

Religion was instituted to make us happy in this life and in the other. What must we do to be happy in the life to come? Be just.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‚The government’s corrupt,‘ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

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

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

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.

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

I don’t have to see a murder in order to condemn murder.

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.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.

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

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

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.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

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

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

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.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.

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

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

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

Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

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

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

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.

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.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

I am a just man.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

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?

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

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

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.