* ...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.
-- Mahnaz Afkhami

The end of the Cold War removed the immediate causes of whole destruction -- but not the threat contained in our knowledge. We must tame this knowledge with the ideals of justice, caring, and compassion summoned from our common human spiritual and moral heritage, if we are to live in peace and serenity in the twenty-first century.
-- Mahnaz Afkhami

* For the world order to be one of peace and justice, for the global village to be a theater of right livelihood, it is imperative that a new and proactive spiritual vision commensurate to the challenges of the emerging world order be enunciated without delay.
-- Swami Agnivesh

"Justice, not expedience, must be the guiding light. The orator must fix his eye on the polestar of justice, and plough straight thither. The moment he glances toward expediency, he falls from his high estate."
-- John Peter Altgeld

* "The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death."
-- John Peter Altgeld

"The poverty and long suffering of farmers and indigenous peoples that I have seen has planted in me the principle that justice must be fought for them."
-- Dewi Rana Amir

* It is essential that justice be done, and it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different.
-- Oscar Arias Sanchez

Justice and peace can only thrive together, never apart.
-- Oscar Arias Sanchez

* Mediation and reconciliation work is about a profound quest for justice and social transformation. But at the same time, they are about service, solidarity, about exploring and rediscovering the human spirit that has been lost or shattered through human conflict, cruelty, ignorance and greed…
-- Hizkias Assefa

Words like 'freedom', 'justice' and 'democracy' are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous, and above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
-- James Baldwin

"Justice from Love, and Love from Justice"
-- Bishop Carlos Belo

* "Those who today still feel a sense of impotence can do something: they can support Amnesty International. They can help it to stand up for freedom and justice."
-- Peter Benenson

* "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."
~ Wendell Berry

* Today social justice represents one of the most serious challenges to the conscience of the world. The abyss between those who are within the world 'order' and those who are excluded is widening day by day. The use of leading-edge technologies has made it possible to accumulate wealth in a way that is fantastic but perverse because it is unjustly distributed. Twenty-percent of humankind control eighty percent of all means of life. That fact creates a dangerous imbalance in the movement of history.
-- Leonardo Boff

* This is not about charity, it's about justice... The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty - I didn't say that, Colin Powell said that . . . In these disturbing and distressing times, surely it's cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than it is to defend yourself against them..Justice is the surest way to get peace.
-- Bono

On trade, our hypocrisy is at its most appalling. Trade reform isn't about charity, it's about justice, and this campaign, Trade Justice is an unstoppable idea.
-- Bono

* Militarism is no longer a synonym for patriotism. Our survival as a planet depends on maintaining peace and justice.
-- Blasé Bonpane

* …the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind. Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world.
-- Norman Borlaug

Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless.
-- Norman Borlaug

If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.
-- Norman Borlaug

* It would be naïve to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems … However, with faith and perseverance, … complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace.
-- Jimmy Carter

The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect.
-- Jimmy Carter

* "If you give yourself totally to the nonviolence struggle for peace and justice you also find that people give you their hearts and you will never go hungry and never be alone."
-- Cesar Chavez

"I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!"
-- Cesar Chavez

What we are working for is an educational program that has become a resource and rallying point for scores of brave southerners who are leading the fight for justice and better race relations in these crucial days
-- Septima Clark

* If you're aware of injustice, you can either ignore it, say there is nothing you can do about it, complain about it and not do anything, or put your energies into doing something about it.
-- Ben Cohen

* "The risks of transporting deadly nuclear waste, the environmental justice impacts and the long-term health effects of both these projects are untenable...We cannot afford to be silent on these important issues."
~ James Cromwell

* You cannot kill the truth. You cannot kill justice. You cannot kill what we are fighting for.
-- Jean Dominique

* The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
-- Marian Wright Edelman

You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.
-- Marian Wright Edelman

* Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"... we have been warned by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself ... There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

* We must apply our humble efforts to the construction of a more just and humane world. And I want to declare emphatically: Such a world is possible. To create this new society, we must present outstretched and friendly hands, without hatred and rancor, even as we show great determination and never waver in the defense of truth and justice. Because we know that we cannot sow seeds with clenched fists. To sow we must open our hands.
-- Adolfo Perez Esquivel

* "...In a world riven by inequity, medicine could be viewed as social justice work."
-- Paul Farmer

"...our civilization, so addicted to knowledge, has fled from wisdom. Knowledge is very, very powerful. If it is not tempered and contoured by greater visions, like justice, compassion, beauty, grace and thinking of the next generation and seven generations to come -- then indeed, it is dangerous. Unfortunately, many of our educational systems in the West are still very dangerous places."
-- Matthew Fox

Compassion is the essence of Jesus’ teaching, and indeed of the teaching of all great spiritual figures from Mohammed to Isaiah, from Lao Tzu to Chief Seattle. Yet compassion has been sentimentalized and severed from its relationship to justice-making and celebration. Creation Spirituality links the struggle for justice with the yearning for mysticism.
-- Matthew Fox

* War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy. If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order
-- Alfred Hermann Fried

* "The ultimate object of education should be, Gandhi said, to help create not only a balanced and harmonious individual but also a balanced and harmonious society where true justice prevails, where there is no unnatural division between the "haves" and the "have-nots," and where everybody is assured of a living wage and the right to live and the right to freedom."
-- Arun Gandhi

* "We live in an age in which the fundamental principles to which we subscribe -- liberty, equality and justice for all -- are encountering extraordinary challenges, ... But it is also an age in which we can join hands with others who hold to those principles and face similar challenges.”
-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

* “Whatever community organization, whether it's a women's organization, or fighting for racial justice … you will get satisfaction out of doing something to give back to the community that you never get in any other way.”
-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright."
-- Samuel Gompers

Today, people are talking about many things: the danger of war and frequent clashes, water and air pollution, hunger, the increasing erosion of moral values, and so on. As a result, many other concerns have come to the fore: peace, contentment, ecology, justice, tolerance, and dialogue. Unfortunately, despite certain promising precautions, those who should be tackling these problems tend to do so by seeking further ways to conquer and control nature and produce more lethal weapons.
-- M. Fethullah Gülen

* "Never be discouraged from being an activist because people tell you that you'll not succeed. You have already succeeded if you're out there representing truth or justice or compassion or fairness or love."
-- Doris Haddock (Granny D)

“The problem, of course, lies with the realities concealed from us. This has always been the case. While the American public has slowly grappled with ongoing injustices visible within our own borders, it has long failed to discover and correct our government's abuses abroad. In the end, however, this is our government, and torture is being utilized in our names and supported by our tax dollars. We are responsible.”
-- Jennifer Harbury

I would like to appeal to all those in whose hands the future of mankind lies, to use their power not to destroy or kill, nor to create suffering in a grasping search for selfish objectives, but to help alleviate the plight of the needy; to aim at justice and freedom for the individual.
-- Poul Hartling

* Let us never cease to feel compassion for those in want. Let us never tire of helping victims of injustice and oppression. He who puts his faith in the restoration of human dignity cannot be wrong.
-- Poul Hartling

I am firmly convinced that in the world of today all nations will be forced to the conclusion that cooperation for law, justice, and peace is the only alternative to a constant race in armaments--including atomic armaments--and to other disruptive practices that will bring the nations participating in them on either side to a common ruin, the equivalent of universal suicide.
-- Cordell Hull

The Sister Fund supports spiritual women and their organizations, both grassroots activists for justice, and national and international social change agents.
-- Helen LaKelly Hunt

I pledge to protect the earth
And respect the Web of Life upon it
And to honor the dignity of every member of our global family
One planet, one people, one world in harmony
With peace, justice and freedom for all.
-- John Ince

This is my creed: Happiness is the only good; reason the only torch; justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

* "We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering. I honestly want to help. I don't believe I feel differently from other people. I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning. All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation someone would help us."
~ Angelina Jolie

"My path in life led me to involvement in several movements for social justice and change."
-- Marilee Karl

* A truly free society must not include a "peace" which oppresses us. We must learn on our own terms what peace and freedom mean together. There can be no peace if there is social injustice and suppression of human rights, because external and internal peace are inseparable. Peace is not just the absence of mass destruction, but a positive internal and external condition in which people are free so that they can grow to their full potential.
-- Petra Kelly

* "World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor -- it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement."
-- John F. Kennedy

* It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
-- Robert F. Kennedy

Centuries ago, Spinoza said "Peace was not the absence of war but a disposition for benevolence, truth and justice". This definition shows how much the individual can achieve in his daily life in the name of peace.
-- Imane Khalifeh

* There can be no peace without justice and respect for human rights.
-- Irene Khan

There can be no peace without justice and respect for human rights. I passionately believe in the power of human rights as a set of global values to bring our fractured and divided world together. Around the world human rights activists are giving hope to millions of people - women, indigenous people, the poor and the marginalised - in their struggle for equality and dignity.
-- Irene Khan

* "Democracy is the absolute value that makes for human dignity, as well as the only road to sustained economic development and social justice."
-- Kim Dae-jung

* True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of Justice.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

* Our ultimate objective in learning about anything is to try to create and develop a more just society.
-- Yuri Kochiyama

We can shape the national sentiment with our voices of compassion and reason. We can send the simple message that we must not kill innocent people in the name of justice.
-- Fran Korten

* Charity isn't a good substitute for justice
-- Jonathan Kozol

I feel privileged to work at an organization that is part of a growing movement to help people adopt environmental and social justice practices into their lives and helps them encourage these values in the broader economy, where our consumer and investor dollars can "vote" for sustainability. At a time when corporations are exerting increasing power over people's lives and the environment, it is vital that we work directly with companies to promote greater responsibility.
-- Todd Larsen

* "With malice toward none, with charity for all, ...let us strive on to finish the work we are in, ...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
-- Abraham Lincoln

* Justice and truth are the common ties of society
-- John Locke

* The true path to peace is shared development. If we do not want war to go global, justice must go global
-- Lula

* Even strong as they are today, rich countries should have no illusion: nobody is safe in aworld of injustices.War will never bring security.War can only generate monsters: bitterness, intolerance, fundamentalism, and the damaging denial of current hegemonies.The poor must be given reasons to live, not to kill or die.
-- Lula

* "If we want to reap the harvest of peace and justice in the future, we will have to sow seeds of nonviolence, here and now, in the present."
-- Mairead Corrigan Maguire

* Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life . . .
-- Nelson Mandela

"Trade justice for the developing world and for this generation is a truly significant way for the developed countries to show commitment to bringing about an end to global poverty."
-- Nelson Mandela

It is a good moment to repeat that a war is never won. Never mind that history books tell us the opposite. The psychological and material costs of war are so high that any triumph is a pyrrhic victory. Only peace can be won and winning peace means not only avoiding armed conflict but finding ways of eradicating the causes of individual and collective violence: injustice and oppression, ignorance and poverty, intolerance and discrimination. We must construct a new set of values and attitudes to replace the culture of war which, for centuries, has been influencing the course of civilization. Winning peace means the triumph of our pledge to establish, on a democratic basis, a new social framework of tolerance and generosity from which no one will feel excluded.
-- Federico Mayor

And this is the time. It is the time for this land to become again a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs. It is the time to live more with faith and less with fear- with an abiding confidence that can sweep away the strongest barriers between us and teach us that we truly are brothers and sisters.
-- George McGovern

* "We are way more powerful when we turn to each other and not on each other, when we celebrate our diversity, focus on our commonality, and together tear down the mighty walls of injustice."
-- Cynthia McKinney

* "Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples."
-- Rigoberta Menchu,

* "Our motto is to work for peace based on social justice. Our mandate is to improve the condition, health and safety of workers, and our mission is universal."
-- David A. Morse

We never will get a full situation of open transparency, but we should seek to bring forth the major concerns about injustice and suffering and dishonesty. This needs to come into the open or there will never be peace in the hearts of us violated.
-- Beyers Naudé

* We could dramatically accelerate innovations in sustainability and social justice just by making choices to use our money for positive solutions.
-- Carol Newell

I think those of us who have extraordinary wealth have an opportunity to leverage that wealth to stimulate a just and sustainable economy. I know it goes against the grain but I know it's possible. It's just about deciding what kind of choices we want to make.
-- Carol Newell

* We've got a lot of work to do economically in this country to bring about a more just and fair economy.
-- Barack Obama

"Refugee problems may often seem intractable but they are not insoluble. In our experience there are two basic prerequisites for solution: the political will of leaders to tackle the causes and to settle for peace, and international determination to push for peace and then to consolidate it. Consolidating peace means helping societies emerging from war to reintegrate refugees in safety and dignity, to rebuild their institutions - including in the field of justice and human rights - and to resume their economic development."
-- Sadako Ogata

The whole system has not one redeeming quality; its very virtues, as they are termed, are vices of great magnitude. Its charities, so called, are gross acts of injustice and deception. Its instructions are to rivet ignorance in the mind and, if possible, render it perpetual. It supports, in all manner of extravagance, idleness, presumption, and uselessness; and oppresses, in almost every mode which ingenuity can devise, industry, integrity and usefulness. It encourages superstition, bigotry and fanaticism; and discourages truth, commonsense and rationality. It generates and cultivates every inferior quality and base passion that human nature can be made to receive; and has so disordered all the human intellects, that they have become universally perplexed and confused, so that man has no just title to be called a reasonable and rational being. It generates violence, robbery and murder, and extols and rewards these vices as the highest of all virtues. Its laws are founded in gross ignorance of individual man and of human society; they are cruel and unjust in the extreme, and, united with all the superstitions in the world, are calculated only to teach men to call that which is pre-eminently true and good, false and bad; and that which is glaringly false and bad, true and good. In short, to cultivate with great care all that leads to vice and misery in the mass, and to exclude from them, with equal care, all that would direct them to true knowledge and real happiness, which alone, combined, deserve the name of virtue.
-- Robert Owen

* "I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people."
-- Rosa Parks

We are privileged to have the opportunity of contributing to the achievement of the goal of the abolition of war and its replacement by world law. I am confident that we shall succeed in this great task; that the world community will thereby be freed not only from the suffering caused by war but also through the better use of the earth's resources, of the discoveries of scientists, and of the efforts of mankind, from hunger, disease, illiteracy, and fear; and that we shall in the course of time be enabled to build a world characterized by economic, political, and social justice for all human beings and a culture worthy of man's intelligence.
-- Linus Pauling

* Thinking about how the world might be and envisioning a society characterized by justice are the essence of conceptualizing the conditions that comprise positive peace. If we are to educate for peace, both teachers and students need to have some notion of the transformed world we are educating for.
-- Betty Reardon

"We are moved to deep humility by the knowledge that even as we are blazing new trails into an as yet uncharted future, we are following in the footsteps of a vast legacy of spiritual leaders and social change makers. The struggle for justice is as old as tyranny itself, and the longing for a world guided by love is as old as the human heart. Thank you for joining us in carrying the great dream forward through the next generation."
~ Ocean Robbins

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.
-- Anita Roddick

For here lies the corner stone of all the injustices done woman, the wrong idea from which all other wrongs proceed. She is not acknowledged as mistress of herself. For her cradle to her grave she is another's. We do indeed need and demand the other rights of which I have spoken, but let us first obtain OURSELVES."
-- Ernestine Rose

"If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are altered."
-- Josephine Ruffin

Today in America as in other parts of the world we see a model of a society in which the powerful dominate. They marginalize and they go as far as to eliminate the weakest before the homogenization caused by this system of globalization. Through providence we have the taking of conscious cultural identity. As such the church has a special mission to be the defender and promoter of a culture of life. This culture of life assumes a preferential option for the poor, opposes or puts the globalization of solidarity in opposition to the globalization of the markets. It makes itself a voice for those who have no voice; denounces all violence, all racial discrimination; walks beside those condemned to the land, those that are displaced; is a promoter of integral development in the construction of peace in the search for justice and liberation. This culture of life is what is expressed as a service of hope. This urgency exists in this precise moment in which the indigenous person, conscious of being a subject to their own history, will not opt for a church that submerges them in a conflict where they have to live their faith being aware of expressing it within a dominant culture. -- Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia

"We learned that we could move others to take action...Even though we couldn't stop the war, I discovered that I could be involved in the movement for peace and justice. From that day on I knew that I was going to be committed to working for change...."
-- Marla Ruzicka

* Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the opressor.
-- Ginetta Sagan

"I've always had a really developed sense of justice. As a child, I would rotate my dolls' dresses for fear that they might come alive at midnight and one of them would always have the best dress on. Whatever it was that made me worry about my dolls I suppose has paid off in my career because, really, an actor is all about empathy and imagination. And those are the cornerstones of activism."
-- Susan Sarandon

* I try to live my life every day in the present, and try not to turn a blind eye to injustice and need.
-- Susan Sarandon

* The Pledge of Allegiance says "...with liberty and justice for all." What part of "all" don't you understand?
~ Patricia Schroeder

* "The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative."
~ Vandana Shiva

* We have more than enough programs, organisations, parties, and strategies in the world for the alleviation of suffering and injustice.
-- Sulak Sivaraksa

* If the ecological crisis, for example, is to be solved and if we are to promote genuine justice and thus bring real peace to the planet—and with it the possibility of improving lives on every level, not just economically, socially, and politically, but spiritually, psychologically, and intellectually—then, just on a practical level, we need to have all of the religions working together."
~ Brother Wayne Teasdale

* The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - This great and inspiring instrument was born of an increased sense of responsibility by the international community for the promotion and protection of man’s basic rights and freedoms. The world has come to a clear realization of the fact that freedom, justice and world peace can only be assured through the international promotion and protection of these rights and freedoms. 
-- U Thant, Third United Nations Secretary-General, 1961-1971

We add our voice ... to those who struggle for the recognition and protection for their rights and cultures, because to the extent that we respect our differences, we shall build a life with more justice.
-- Francisco Toledo

* "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
--Archbishop Desmond Tutu

* Today, I wish that the millions of displaced people would be able to return with the necessary conditions of safety and dignity, that people in exile could return to their home-country as the intelligence is needed, that cruelty, political killings, poverty and hunger cease. I wish that our people recover their dignity, truth is revealed and justice exists.
-- Alirio Uribe Muñoz

* In many parts of the world the people are searching for a solution which would link the two basic values: peace and justice. The two are like bread and salt for mankind.
-- Lech Walesa

“There are those who believe justice and dignity are reserved only for some people. Young men have died in police custody, and the growing heel of poverty has worn down harder on children of color...We must fight back."
~ Elizabeth Warren

* The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.
-- Simone Weil

* Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people.
-- Paul Wellstone

* “There can’t be peace in the world if there isn’t justice.”
-- Barbara Wiedner

* “There is no freedom without justice.”
-- Simon Wiesenthal

* My cause was justice, not vengeance. My work is for a better tomorrow and a more secure future for our children and grandchildren.
-- Simon Wiesenthal

* “An enormous discrepancy exists between the way we talk about equality in the abstract and the value as translated into laws and justice.”
~Roy Wilkins

* We want to live and love and build a just and peaceful society.
-- Betty Williams & The Peace People

* We have to speak out now on behalf of our community and on behalf of the land and say they're the same thing and say "No, we are not rolling over" and "No, this is not a corporate enterprise." This is democracy in the fullest sense and we must have regard and reverence and those are the cornerstones of a just society.
~ Terry Tempest Williams

* It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.
-- Mary Wollstonecraft

* We have come this far always believing
that justice would somehow prevail.
This is the burden, this is the promise,
and THIS is why we will not fail.
-- Peter Yarrow

I love life and want to hold onto it. But my passion for justice for my tormented people, for their dignity and freedom, must be greater still. For of what value is a life of slavery, of humiliation and contempt for that which you hold most dear: Your identity! I will therefore not give in to the Turkish Inquisition.
-- Leyla Zana

* Our planet is dying - both spiritually and physically. Fear, aggression and greed, narrow-minded national interests and immature dominance and control over others is a common theme in most countries. However, there are more and more people who define themselves as global citizens, who know that life is intimately interconnected, and that we can never be fully human whilst others continue to suffer, and who know that love, justice and nonviolence is the very essence of life. And what gives me hope is the very many different ways in which ordinary people are taking responsibility. They are creating the changes needed to pass beyond war and injustice, control and dominance and towards a free, just, loving, and diverse world.
-- Angie Zelter