Walter Brueggemann Quotes

I did not dedicate my life to making Baltimore a safer and more just place because it was easy.

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

We Mexicans believe in the force of the law, not in the law of force

Plain truth, backed up by neither power or money, has no chance.

If all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.

To be a political philosopher is more a vocation than a career …. it is a vocation for thinking about the political. Not just day-to-day politics, but about the phenomenon of the political, that all communities of any degree of complexity organize themselves according to certain principles of justice, equality, reciprocity, and authority.

In the Guru's house religion and worldly enjoyment shall be combined—the caldron to supply the poor and the needy, and the scimitar to smite the oppressors.

The vision of Israel's prophets became the pillar of fire leading the struggle in support of the weak and the different towards equality.

Israel should aspire to be a decent country. That's good enough for me.

1963, because of the sense of moral authority that the civil rights movement had, we were able to get people to respond, because of the quality of our demand and our sense of moral authority.

We are building a country where a person's prospects are determined by their own initiative and hard work and not by the color of their skin, place of birth, gender, language, or income of their parents.

Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

I knew then and I know now, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it.

Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.

It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

Power at its best is love implementing the demand of justice.

There is no power without justice.

Justice demands that the good and hard-working be rewarded and the evil and the lazy be punished (if only by the withholding of the rewards of doing the right things). Modern Liberalism demands that the good and hardworking be punished as the recipients of an unfair advantage and the evil and the lazy be rewarded, their acts of evil and their failure all the proof the Modern Liberal needs that somehow they have been victimized by forces out of their control.

Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And that man's feeble attempt to lay down the principles of deceny.

The only government that I recognize--and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army--is that power thatestablishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.

They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.