Gerry Spence Quotes

I grew up thinking the most decent job to do was to fight injustice.

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

I ran against a Prejudice that quite cut off the view.

There is no justice in following unjust laws.

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

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.

We must take the profit out of prejudice.

The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.

If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.

If I do not fight bigotry wherever it is, bigotry is thereby strengthened. And to the degree that it is strengthened, it will, thereby, have the power to turn on me.

There is no debt with so much prejudice put off as that of justice.

All my life I have fought against prejudice and intolerance.

A good person will resist an evil system with his whole soul. Disobedience of the laws of an evil state is therefore a duty.

I really think that discrimination and racism is a horrible thing. And I don't want any form of it in our government, in our public sphere.

It just seems silly to me that something so right and simple has to be fought for at all.

I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.

For peace do not hope; to be just you must break it. Still work for the minute and not for the year.

There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor.

I would hope that racism is something that just does not work in this day and age, but I know otherwise.

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison, the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. They do not know how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government should enslave the less number that would be free? more just it is, doubtless, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, their liberty, than that a greater number, for the pleasure of their baseness, compel a less most injuriously to be their fellow-slaves. They who seek nothing but their own just liberty, have always right to win it and to keep it, whenever they have power, be the voices never so numerous that oppose it.

I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done...in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done!