Justice × Consciousness

Justice and Consciousness

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under justice with "consciousness" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Justice with "consciousness" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Justice and Consciousness; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has pr…" The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "To me it is not in the least demeaning that consciousness and intelligence are the result of “mere” matter sufficiently complexly arranged;…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Justice quotes or the concept page for Consciousness.

30 Quotes on Justice and Consciousness

"Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."

— Albert Einstein

"To me it is not in the least demeaning that consciousness and intelligence are the result of “mere” matter sufficiently complexly arranged; on the contrary, it is an exalting tribute to the subtlety of matter and the laws of Nature."

"The Democratical State is not Patriarchal, does not rest on a still unreflecting, undeveloped confidence, but implies laws, with the consciousness of their being founded on an equitable and moral basis, and the recognition of these laws as positive. At the time of the Kings, no political life had as yet made its appearance in Hellas; there are, therefore, only slight traces of Legislation. But in the interval from the Trojan War till near the time of Cyrus, its necessity was felt. The first Lawgivers are known under the name of The Seven Sages, a title which at that time did not imply any such character as that of the Sophists teachers of wisdom, designedly proclaiming the Bight and True but merely thinking men, whose thinking stopped short of Science, properly so called. They were practical politicians; the good counsels which two of them Thales of Miletus and Bias of Priene gave to the Ionian cities, have been already mentioned. Thus Solon was commissioned by the Athenians to give them laws, as those then in operation no longer sufficed. Solon gave the Athenians a constitution by which all obtained equal rights, yet not so as to render the Democracy a quite abstract one. The main point in Democracy is moral disposition. Virtue is the basis of Democracy, remarks Montesquieu; and this sentiment is as important as it is true in reference to the idea of Democracy commonly entertained. The Substance, of Justice, the common weal, the general interest, is the main consideration; but it is so only as Custom, in the form of Objective Will, so that morality properly so called subjective conviction and intention has not yet manifested itself. Law exists, and is in point of substance, the Law of Freedom, rational and valid because it is Law, i.e. without ulterior sanction. As in Beauty the Natural element its sensuous coefficient remains, so also in this customary morality, laws assume the form of a necessity of Nature."

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to selfawareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

"Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about its origin is an idle and just as sophistical a question as that old one, "What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone? Wasn't there a stone out of which came the first fruit-tree? Wasn't there a fruit-tree from which came the first stone? Journals and Papers, Hannay, 1996 1843 IVA49"

— Søren Kierkegaard

"It is true that the moral consciousness of the world must recognize the importance of removing injustices and well-founded grievances; but at the same time it must be aroused to the cardinal necessity of honoring sanctity of treaties, of respecting the rights and liberties of others, and of putting an end to acts of international aggression."

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Gentile was, in fact, a lifelong socialist. Like Marx, he viewed socialism as the sine qua non of social justice, the ultimate formula for everyone paying their ‘fair share.’ For Gentile, fascism is nothing more than a modified form of socialism, a socialism arising not merely from material deprivation but also from an aroused national consciousness, a socialism that unites rather than divides communities."

— Dinesh D'Souza

"Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter . . . Yet at a deeper level are actually inseparable and interwoven , just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation."

"In the human being, as he evolves and develops, these two stages can equally be seen. There is the early or atomic stage, in which a man's whole centre of interest lies within himself, within his own sphere, where self-centredness is the law of his being, a necessary protective stage of evolution. He is purely selfish, and concerned primarily with his own affairs. This is succeeded by a later stage, in which a man's consciousness begins to expand, his interests begin to lie outside his own particular sphere, and the period arrives in which he is feeling for the group to which he belongs. This stage might be viewed as corresponding to that of radio-activity. He is now not only a self-centred life, but he is also beginning to have a definite effect upon his surroundings. He is turning his attention from his own personal selfish life, and is seeking his greater centre. From being simply an atom he is, in his turn, becoming an electron, and coming under the influence of the great central Life which holds him within the sphere of Its influence."

— Alice Bailey

"The pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege."

"Our point isn’t to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures."

— Alan Hirsch

"The Irish had tough times, but little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans. That experience should be part of every American’s consciousness, and law enforcement’s role in that experience—including in recent times—must be remembered. It is our cultural inheritance."

— James Comey

"The change in consciousness will not take place automatically, just as it doesn't take place automatically in the economy. The alterations are slow and are not harmonious; there are periods of acceleration, pauses and even retrogressions."

— Che Guevara

"“What is an oath?” . . . t is founded on a degree of consciousness that there is a Power above us that will reward our virtues or punish our vices. . . . ur system of oaths in all our courts, by which we hold liberty and property and all our rights, are founded on or rest on Christianity and a religious belief."

— Daniel Webster

"'I believe that "government", as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a "Grameenized private sector", a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.'"

— Muhammad Yunus

"I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to inexorable laws. I never could get quite clear as to what this consciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled and worried and helpless."

— John Buchan

"How do we define consciousness, or what has been called the human soul or the spirit, if it can't be quantified as matter or a particle? … it can be quantified or observed just by a process of elimination."

— Vanna Bonta

"The purpose of consciousness is to illuminate the world. If we try to run consciousness at half its proper voltage, the result will be a "devalued" world. But that is not the fault of the world; it is our fault. Low-voltage consciousness shows us less of the world than high-voltage consciousness, just as we would see an art gallery less clearly by candlelight than by sunlight."

— Colin Wilson

"Ever since the last great conflict the world has been putting a renewed emphasis, not on preparation to succeed in war, but on an attempt by preventing war to succeed in peace. This movement has the full and complete approbation of the American Government and the American people. While we have been unwilling to interfere in the political relationship of other countries and have consistently refrained from intervening except when our help has been sought and we have felt that it could be effectively given, we have signified our willingness to become associated with other nations in a practical plan for promoting international justice through the World Court. Such a tribunal furnishes a method of the adjustment of international differences in accordance with our treaty rights and under the generally accepted rules of international law. When questions arise which all parties agree ought to be adjudicated but which do not yield to the ordinary methods of diplomacy, here is a forum to which the parties may voluntarily repair in the consciousness that their dignity suffers no diminution and that their cause will be determined impartially, according to the law and the evidence. That is a sensible, direct, efficient, and practical method of adjusting differences which can not fail to appeal to the intelligence of the American people."

— Calvin Coolidge

"The encounter with bureaucracy takes place in a mode of explicit abstraction. … This fact gives rise to a contradiction. The individual expects to be treated “justly.” As we have seen, there is considerable moral investment in this expectation. The expected “just” treatment, however, is possible only if the bureaucracy operates abstractly, and that means it will treat the individual “as a number.” Thus the very “justice” of this treatment entails a depersonalization of each individual case. At least potentially, this constitutes a threat to the individual’s self-esteem and, in the extreme case, to his subjective identity. The degree to which this threat is actually felt will depend on extrinsic factors, such as the influence of culture critics who decry the “alienating” effects of bureaucratic organization. One may safely generalize here that the threat will be felt in direct proportion to the development of individualistic and personalistic values in the consciousness of the individual. Where such values are highly developed, it is likely that the intrinsic abstraction of bureaucracy will be felt as an acute irritation at best or an intolerable oppression at worst. In such cases the “duties” of the bureaucrat collide directly with the “rights” of the client—not, of course, those “rights” that are bureaucratically defined and find their correlates in the “duties” of the bureaucrat, but rather those “rights” that derive from extrabureaucratic values of personal autonomy, dignity and worth. The individual whose allegiance is given to such values is almost certainly going to resent being treated “as a number."

— Peter L. Berger

"...poets are sensitive to the challenge 'What is the moral justification of poetry?' because they are conscious of the intrinsic goodness of poetry. Goody-goody humanitarian causes draw them easily into membership by making them wince at the notion of all the injustices prevalent in the world of physical consciousness. Let it be declared as clearly as possible that the goodness of poetry is not moral goodness, the goodness of temporal action, but the goodness of thought, the loving exercise of the will in the pursuit of truth."

— Laura Riding

"Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence."

— Julian Jaynes

"But most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens. When we look closely at resistance movements, or even at isolated forms of rebellion, we discover that class consciousness, or any other awareness of injustice, has multiple levels. It has many ways of expression, many ways of revealing itself-open, subtle, direct, distorted. In a system of intimidation and control, people do not show how much they know, how deeply they feel, until their practical sense informs them they can do so without being destroyed."

— Howard Zinn

"Just as the American colonials' consciousness expanded from rebelling against unfair taxation in the 1760s to wide noble revolutionary goals touching on the inherent rights of mankind, so the Whiskey Rebellion guerrillas took on broader themes as injustice increasingly framed their consciousness. Once you start seeing injustice in one place, it's like taking off blinders- you start to see injustice everywhere, and how it is all connected."

"Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism."

— Eric S. Raymond

"This, then, is the gain of the Good Fight in this war, first, that the nation has attained a living consciousness of its inevitable unity, second, that it has proved its enormous power, and third, that in the terrible struggle it has used that united power for, and not against, equal rights. And the spirit of caste which it has disabled it will now utterly destroy. For the Good Fight is not a crusade against a section or a State, but against caste everywhere in the country. This is now entrenched in the bitter prejudice against the colored race, which is as inhuman and unmanly as the old hatred and contempt of Christendom for the Jews. Lifting their heads from bloody defeat in the field, the wan and wasted States of the South say in terms caste must be maintained, and by every kind of vagrant law and hostile legislation they will try to maintain it."

— George William Curtis

"It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond the-one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-buinsess, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgement to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals an how much. I always wanted to put together an outlaw handbook that would help raise consciousness on these points while doing something about evening the score. There was also the challenge of testing the limits of free speech."

— Abbie Hoffman

"A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death."

— Boris Sidis

"“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states."

— Charles Stross

"The world will not find justice and peace so long as half of the world’s population lives in poverty while the other half cannibalizes the Earth to maintain its standard of living. This dire situation can and must be transformed into a world of abundance, clean and plentiful energy and genuine sustainability. On this foundation, with these new sciences, technologies and a new consciousness, we can move forward as a people, united and in peace. Then and only then will we be welcome amongst the other civilizations of the cosmos."

— Steven M. Greer

Key thinkers on this theme

Albert Einstein· Science Carl Sagan· Science Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel· Philosophy Søren Kierkegaard· Philosophy Franklin D. Roosevelt· Politics

Related ideas in Justice

All Justice quotes Explore the idea of Consciousness