Social Justice Quotes - Page 23

• All life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Brother, Agony, Justice

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice”, p.88, Beacon Press

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• I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, Block, Order

  Letter from Birmingham Jail, Alabama, 16 Apr. 1963, in Atlantic Monthly Aug. 1963, p. 81

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• We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountaintop. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Land, Justice, Diversity

  I've Been to the Mountaintop, delivered 3 April 1968, Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee

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• We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Brother, Hands, Justice

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Mother, Justice, Diversity

  Maxine Hong Kingston, Paul Skenazy, Tera Martin (1998). “Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston”, p.11, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?

  Vicesimus Knox

  Ignorance, Justice, Diversity

  In Mary Wollstonecraft 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1792) ch. 7

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• More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Education, Suicide, Children

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• There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.

  Karl Kraus

  Justice, Diversity, People

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• The world more often rewards the appearances of merit than merit itself.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Justice, Diversity, Rewards

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• The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured.

  Suzanne La Follette

  Wine, Men, Rights

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• Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

  Suzanne La Follette

  Real, Justice, Diversity

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• To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds.

  Dilys Laing

  Justice, House, Bed

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• There is no more certain sign of a narrow mind, of stupidity, and of arrogance, than to stand aloof from those who think differently from us.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Thinking, Justice, Diversity

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans”, p.428

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• Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often loses himself.

  Primo Levi

  Men, Clothes, Justice

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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• Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Rights, Tyrants, Justice

  Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Schurz, Joseph Choate, Francis F. Browne (2017). “LINCOLN – Complete 7 Volume Edition: Biographies, Speeches and Debates, Civil War Telegrams, Letters, Presidential Orders & Proclamations: Including the Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt & 3 Biographies: The Every-day Life of the President, Lincoln by Carl Shurz and Abraham Lincoln by Joseph H. Choate”, p.1246, Madison & Adams Press

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• Why should anyone think a white skin superior in evaluating the qualities of human life? I did not really admire a white skin so much myself. Did I not prefer the brown skin that came with exposure to the sun?

  Charles Lindbergh

  Thinking, White, Justice

  Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1978). “Autobiography of values”, Harcourt

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• All of our people all over the country-except the pure-blooded Indians-are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Country, People, Justice

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• As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military when they should be using that same energy getting rid of the military completely.

  Ned Rorem

  Military, Gay, Men

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• Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Justice, Diversity, Judging

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Christopher Kelly, Allan David Bloom (2010). “Emile, Or, On Education: Includes Emile and Sophie, Or, The Solitaries”, p.355, UPNE

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• The more humanity owes him, the more society denies him. Every door is shut against him, even when he has a right to its being opened: and if he ever obtains justice, it is with much greater difficulty than others obtain favors.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Doors, Justice, Diversity

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1993). “The Social Contract ; And, The Discourses”, Everyman's Library

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• It is part of the amazing originality of Christ that there is to be found in his teaching no word whatever which suggests a difference in the spiritual ideals, the spheres, or the potentialities of men and women.

  Maude Royden

  Spiritual, Teaching, Men

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• It occurred to me when I was thirteen and wearing white gloves and Mary Janes and going to dancing school, that no one should have to dance backward all their lives.

  William Ruckelshaus

  School, Should Have, White

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• Women's rights in essence is really a movement for freedom, a movement for equality, for the dignity of all women, for those who work outside the home and those who dedicate themselves with more altruism than any profession I know to being wives and mothers, cooks and chauffeurs, and child psychologists and loving human beings.

  William Ruckelshaus

  Mother, Children, Home

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• Prejudice is not so much dependent upon natural antipathy as upon education.

  David Ruggles

  Wise, Wisdom, Justice

  David Ruggles (1834). “The "extinguisher" Extinguished!: Or, David M. Reese, M.D. "used Up."”, p.13

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• I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.

  Richard Rumbold

  Believe, Fate, Men

  On the scaffold, in T. B. Macauley 'Histories of England' vol. 1 (1849) ch. 1

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