H. L. Mencken Quotes

And Justice for Some

Justice is not available to all equally; it is something that many of us must struggle to achieve.

Well you know, all law is about injustice.

The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law

Equal justice means that there is not one set of rules for the powerful and another for everyone else.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

The scales of American justice are out of balance.

All men are created equal. Some, it appears, are created a little more equal than others.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

There's something in people's character, particularly the British character, about unfairness. They don't like it.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Sometimes it leads me even to hesitate whether I am strictly correct in my idea that all men are born to equal rights, for their conduct seems to me to contravene the doctrine.

I don't think we live in a particularly equal society.

There's never going to be a system that is fair to everyone.

Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured.

There is no justice in social justice, and there is no equality in social equality.

American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

It is time for our government leaders to respect the law no less than our humblest citizen, so that we can end the double standard of justice in America.

The rankest form of hypocrisy. Laws that are good enough for everybody else ought to be good enough for us.

We contend that in all laws made, or to be made, every person shall be bound alike—neither should any tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place, confer any exemption from the ordinary course of legal proceedings and responsibilities whereunto others are subjected.

The law should be no respecter of persons but should treat all alike, save where dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy.

I don’t think the pardon power should only be available to the people who are prominent and well connected…. It should be available to people in trailer parks also.

There's lots of law these days, but not much justice.