injustice quotes

Abigail Adams: 

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Albert Einstein: 

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

Aung San Suu Kyi: 

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people.

Barbara Ehrenreich: 

That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing -- the truly democratic thing about it -- is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.

Cesar Chavez: 

The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.

Dennis Wholey: 

Expecting the world to treat you fairly 
because you are a good person 
is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you 
because you are a vegetarian.

Edmund Burke (attributed): 

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: 

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.

Eugene V. Debs: 

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
1908 speech


Frederick Douglass: 

Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Gunnar Myrdal: 

The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery without almost noticing them.

Henry David Thoreau: 

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

Henry David Thoreau: 

If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC: 

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Isabel Allende: 

We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

John L. Lewis: 

Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

Justice William O. Douglas: 

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

Lillian Hellman: 

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Marian Wright Edelman: 

You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Maya Angelou: 

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Paulo Freire: 

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Pearl S. Buck: 

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

Pearl S. Buck: 

We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.

Plato: 

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn: 

The golf links lie so near the mill
  That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
  And see the men at play.
  [from "Through the Needle's Eye," 1916]

Saul Alinsky: 

Last guys don't finish nice.

Sharon Welch: 

Resistance to oppression is often based on a love that leads us to value ourselves, and leads us to hope for more 
than the established cultural system is willing to grant ... such love is far more energizing than guilt, duty, or self-sacrifice. Love for others leads us to accept accountability (in contrast to feeling guilt) and motivates our search for ways to end our complicity with structures of oppression. Solidarity does not require self-sacrifice, but an enlargement of the self to include community with others. [The Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Sharon Welch: 

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Simone Weil: 

Obvious and inexorable oppression that cannot be overcome does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

Stephen Jay Gould: 

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Studs Terkel: 

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

Thomas Jefferson: 

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them.

William E. Gladstone : 

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.