William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

I'd like to professionally... continue my education and hopefully become an attorney. I think that's the best way to stop the miscarriage of justice that happened to me from happening to somebody else. I don't think it should ever happen to anyone ever again - not one person.

Today, the judicial system of a modern country cannot hold to these savage traditions, completely inhuman for the young woman

Old radicals never changed. They just got law degrees and updated their bag of tricks.

It is essential to institute a legal framework that would ensure justice and improve the quality of life in Burma immediately, because the greatest suffering among the people at the moment is caused by lack of justice and lack of the rule of law.

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.

Religion has gotten a bad rap for good reasons. Often, there are a lot of people - women, LBGT, and others - you know, hierarchical monotheism has been a real source of a type of oppression.

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset.

It is not a case of our people...wanting either separation or integration. The use of these words actually clouds the real picture. The 22 million Afro-Americans don't seek either separation or integration. They seek recognition and respect as human beings.

I think our legal system needs to be developed. Cases of citizens who are detained and then have to wait much too long for a trial - that is scary, for everyone. When someone commits a crime he needs to be charged quickly. Why does this take so long in many cases? I don't know. Is it because our legal system is still rudimentary? China has promised to modernize its legal system. This has high priority.

Every improvement in our conceptions of justice, as well as in the machinery for the administration of justice, whereby a closer approximation to exact justice may be secured, will make for social peace, though the mere adjudication of conflicting interests will not remove the conflicts themselves nor their cause. That lies deeper than legislatures or courts can probe.

... together we can build the people's Church, a true Church. Not just a hierarchy, or a building, but a real change inside people.

There are other people who don't mind shouting from the pulpit and being judged for it, and they do a hell of a lot of good - real, on-the-ground, life-changing good. So I think it can sometimes be a balancing act.

Saturday was 90 minutes when people would judge whether we were the real deal

People need to stand up, women need to stand up for each other and say, "No you can't kick this person like they're a dog. You can disagree with someone politically, you can have arguments, definitely privilege needs to be discussed in real productive and valid ways. But it's not real criticism if it's just like, "you're a disgusting bad person."

I hear a lot of cries of socialism and certainly real disguises of "Why should I share my money with these people?" We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."

Criticizing lawyers for lawsuits is like criticizing linebackers for knocking people down.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love.

I have done more for black people than any other person in the nation, North or South.

The conditions that we are suffering force us to address the real issues that affect the life and well-being of the majority of our people. That is why the call for reparations and justice in dealing with the problems of Black people is so relevant now.

Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations.

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

You are the Protector of the Small. You see real people in the humans and animals overlooked by your peers. There will always be work for you.

The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal - to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can't end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves.

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you...take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.