“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
The Prophet Micah, 1611 · Hebrew prophet of the eighth century BCE
Chapter 4
On Justice
“But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”
The Prophet Amos, 1611 · Hebrew prophet, a herdsman of Tekoa
“Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour.”
Book of Leviticus, 1611 · Hebrew law code
“Stand fast to justice when ye bear witness, though it be against yourselves, or your parents, or your kindred, whether the party be rich or poor.”
The Quran, 1861 · Surah An-Nisa, the Women
“The first office of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another, unless provoked by wrong; and the next is to lead men to use common possessions for the common interests.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 44 BC · Roman orator, writing to his son on duty
“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.”
Henry David Thoreau, 1849 · American essayist
“On three things does the world stand: on justice, on truth and on peace.”
Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel, c. 200 AD · Jewish sage of the second century
“You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we cant take more than our pint'll hold.”
Sojourner Truth, 1851 · abolitionist and preacher, at the Akron women's convention
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class. It is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.”
Anna Julia Cooper, 1892 · American educator, born enslaved in North Carolina
“Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”
Book of Proverbs, 1611 · Hebrew wisdom literature, the words of King Lemuel's mother
People accept decisions that go against them when the process felt fair and they were treated with respect. Research on legitimacy finds that how a ruling is reached matters more than who won.
Tom R. Tyler, 2006 · legal psychologist, procedural justice research
Bargaining games run in fifteen small-scale societies found no group behaving as pure self-interest predicts. People everywhere paid real money to punish an offer they judged unfair.
Joseph Henrich and colleagues, 2005 · anthropologists, cross-cultural behavioural experiments
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