Quotes on Religion and Philosophy

Learned Hand:

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

Speech to the New York Legal Aid Society on February 16, 1951. Quoted from: Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, 1988.

John Jay Chapman:

People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,—that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.

Practical Agitation (1898).

Thomas Merton:

It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God's will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you - try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God's will yourself!

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, chapter 14, p. 107 (1949).

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Friedrich Nietzsche:

Origin of justice. -- Justice (fairness) originates among those who are approximately equally powerful, as Thucydides (in the terrible conversation between the Athenian and Melian ambassadors) comprehended correctly: where there is no clearly recognizable predominance and a fight would mean inconclusive mutual damage, there the idea originates that one might come to an understanding and negotiate one's claims: the initial character of justice is the character of a trade. Each satisfies the other inasmuch as each receives what he esteems more than the other does. One gives another what he wants, so that it becomes his, and in return one receives what one wants. Thus justice is repayment and exchange on the assumption of an approximately equal power position; revenge originally belongs in the domain of justice, being an exchange. Gratitude, too.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, #92

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William Rehnquist:

We may assume, for the sake of argument..., that in a capital case a truly persuasive demonstration of 'actual innocence' made after trial would render the execution of a defendant unconstitutional. [emphasis added]

Opinion, Herrera v. Collins, 1989