Charity is no substitute for justice denied - Aquinas
The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others. - Robert Owen
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If [the people] ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. Thomas Jefferson, (Attributed)
Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere. - Martin Luther King
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. Paulo Freire
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. John Peter Altgeld
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. Frederick Douglass
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 da Silva
but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal. - Robert Owen
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
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
I wonder about putting that Aquinas quote in there, he was one of those ascetic types who was disgusted about bodily functions and sex. Hmm. Its still a nice quote, but the man himself I probably wouldn't like.
How many ideas have there been in the history of mankind which were unthinkable ten years before and which, when their mysterious hour struck suddenly appeared, and spread all over the earth?
-Dostoyevsky
-Dostoyevsky
