Yaron Ezrahi Quotes

We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That's a political process.

It seems to me morally a decent society will try to take some of the increased benefit and use that to alleviate the pain of the few who are bearing the cost that made it possible.

Property has its duties as well as its rights…. To the neglect of these duties in times past is mainly to be attributed to that diseased state of society in which such crimes can take their rise…. It is not in the enactment of statutes of extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more faithful performance of those duties … that a permanent remedy … is to be sought.

The media seems to think only abortion and gay marriage are religious issues. Poverty is a moral issue, it's a faith issue, it's a religious issue.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

Egalitarian policies are the best way to unite and empower people, and are also a necessary counterweight to the sometimes detrimental influence of market forces.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

The doctrine of laissez faire is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals.

No man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime… It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.

The possession of wealth does not confer upon the wealthy the right to take advantage of the less fortunate.

It's not just that government has failed us. It's not just that we have failed ourselves. It's government. It's individuals. It's sort of everything in between, from families and communities and neighborhoods, churches and so forth.

No vicarious charity can substitute for justice which is due as an obligation and is wrongfully denied.

Wherever injustice occurs, we all need to be concerned.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Always remember: the alleviation of poverty is never a political or economic issue - it is moral.

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.

If a policy is wrongheaded, feckless and corrupt, I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

There is no justice among men.

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans.