William Stafford Quotes

justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.

In every human society, there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the height of power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery. The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort and to diffuse their influence universally and equally.

Looking for equality everywhere is a huge mistake because equals are terrible and boring. But a sense of fairness and justice is a totally different thing and a much more complex thing.

It is better to lose everything you have to keep the balance of justice level, than to live a life of petty privilege devoid of true freedom.

We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.

You can’t have two wrongs make one civil right.

I will be a broken record for justice.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

Anytime anyone is enslaved or in any way deprived of his liberty, that person, as a human being, as far as I'm concerned he is justified to resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again.

For all the injustices in our past and our present, we have to believe that in the free exchange of ideas, justice will prevail over injustice, tolerance over intolerance and progress over reaction.

Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.

And just as two wrongs don't make a right, rage against offenders is probably the worst way to try to correct them.

There must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice if we only know how to find it.

Had courage, wisdom, and reason always prevailed in people, there would not have been oppressions and oppressors.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

We need to realize that we should be on the side of any human being who is oppressed.

I think justice is important because there are many injustices in the world and I hate injustice.

I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

I was just as anxious to prevent injustice as to cause justice.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

We must take the profit out of prejudice.