Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

Charleston has much intelligence, and considerable genuine culture; but go twenty miles away, and you are in the land of the barbarians. So, Raleigh is a city in which there is love of beauty, and interest in education; but the common people of the county are at least forty years behind the same class of people in Vermont. Moreover, in Macon are many very fine residences, and the city may boast of its gentility and its respect for the nourishing elegancies of life; but a dozen miles out are large neighborhoods not yet half-civilized. The contrast between the inhabitants of the cities and those of the country is hardly less striking than that between the various classes constituting the body of the common people. Going from one county into another is frequently going into a foreign country. Travel continually brings novelty, but with that always came pain. Till all these hateful walls of caste are thrown down, we can have neither intelligent love of liberty, decent respect for justice, nor enlightened devotion to the idea of national unity.

I get it, cops deal with a lot, but at the same time, we crave justice, and we do want to believe things are going to be all right.

Our policemen and women are disrespected. We need law and order, but we need justice, too.

Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the 'criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

Effective law enforcement and social justice must be pursued together, as the foundation of our efforts against crime.

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

A city suffering from chronic poverty, out-of-control crime, a $76 million budget deficit and a 15 percent unemployment rate (nearly 50 percent for Oakland's youth) can hardly afford such social justice follies. But a pushover Democratic mayor and an overwhelmed police force have left what's left of gainfully employed Oakland taxpayers at the mercy of professional freeloaders and anti-capitalism saboteurs.

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.

The law is not an end in itself, nor does it provide ends. It is preeminently a means to serve what we think is right.

It makes me crazy to think that somebody might attack my city or any other city.

We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

I think that we are in a position to continue to make progress, but it's gonna require us to both recognize what the problems are, also recognize the progress we've made. Last point I'd make on this, since we're on criminal justice: During the course of my presidency crime has been the lowest it's been probably since the '60s.

I've laid out a platform that I think would begin to remedy some of the problems we have in the criminal justice system.

No one must say that they cannot be close to the poor because their own lifestyle demands more attention to other areas. This is an excuse commonly heard in academic, business or professional, and even ecclesial circles. While it is quite true that the essential vocation and mission of the lay faithful is to strive that earthly realities and all human activity may be transformed by the Gospel, none of us can think we are exempt from concern for the poor and for social justice

I never think of the word legacy. It doesn't mean anything. You do the right thing, in my judgment, and things will work out. That's what drives me. I'm not looking for legacy or history books or whatever. I know what we've done here has saved a significant number of lives. The burden is not on me. It's on the politicians who made the decisions to limit what we're doing. They're the ones who are going to pay a price, in my judgment, if crime significantly increases.

Justice has always evoked ideas of Equality, of proportion of compensation. In short, Justice is another name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

...Any definition of a culture of peace must address the problem of achieving justice for communities and individuals who do not have the means to compete or cope without structured assistance and compassionate help.

You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.

I think racial justice - and addressing the sick and enduring legacy of structural racism - remains one of the greatest challenges of our time, and one that's particularly important for more and more white people to speak up about.

None of us can think we are exempt from concerns for the poor and for social justice.

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

You must first of all think justly. Don’t sit in judgment over others when you don’t know the truth of the matter.

What whites have rarely had to think about—because being the dominant group, we are so used to having our will done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human.

I will continue to fight for justice, fairness, and constitutional rights until my dying breath.