Denial Of Justice Quotes

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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
Lies don't end relationships the truth does.
Shannon L. Alder
One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity.
Seneca
The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).
Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice)
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Political correctness’ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.
DaShanne Stokes
Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can't life and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.
Ursula K. Le Guin (No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters)
You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
If you are slightly different, if your face doesn’t fit, they judge you and consign you and throw away the fucking key. They never, ever stop to think that THEY might be wrong, that THEY are making a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t been the victim of a massive miscarriage of justice - I’m not saying that - BUT I know what it’s like to be stinking judged before people have even bothered to find out what you are about. They have boxed me off into the ugly group even before I have opened my gob. SOCIETY IS SHIT.
Rae Earl (My Mad Fat Diary (Rae Earl, #1))
Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value.
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (The Meaning of Love)
The denial of truth does not harm the Truth; it only harms that which denies the Truth.
Criss Jami (Healology)
In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail. JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN Trauma and Recovery
Jon Krakauer (Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town)
As all men are touched by God’s love, so all are also touched by the desire for His intimacy. No one escapes this longing; we are all kings in exile, miserable without the Infinite. Those who reject the grace of God have a desire to avoid God, as those who accept it have a desire for God. The modern atheist does not disbelieve because of his intellect, but because of his will; it is not knowledge that makes him an atheist…The denial of God springs from a man’s desire not to have a God—from his wish that there were no Justice behind the universe, so that his injustices would fear not retribution; from his desire that there be no Law, so that he may not be judged by it; from his wish that there were no Absolute Goodness, that he might go on sinning with impunity. That is why the modern atheist is always angered when he hears anything said about God and religion—he would be incapable of such a resentment if God were only a myth. His feeling toward God is the same as that which a wicked man has for one whom he has wronged: he wishes he were dead so that he could do nothing to avenge the wrong. The betrayer of friendship knows his friend exists, but he wished he did not; the post-Christian atheist knows God exists, but he desires He should not.
Fulton J. Sheen (Peace of Soul: Timeless Wisdom on Finding Serenity and Joy by the Century's Most Acclaimed Catholic Bishop)
The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead.10 There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
It didn’t take long for me to see how intertwined all of our struggles are. Justice is justice. And the denial of justice for any one group of people erodes justice for all people. Attacks on the rights of transgender people to access health care are tied to assaults on abortion rights, as both are grounded in a fight for sexual autonomy, a tug-of-war with the government over control of our own bodies. The fight for immigrant rights is an LGBTQ+ fight, too, because it is a collective demand for human-centered politics that treat people with a basic level of decency. And the work of dismantling systemic racism is ours as well.
Brandon J. Wolf (A Place for Us: A Memoir)
Every hour be firmly resolved... to accomplish the work at hand with fitting and unaffected dignity, goodwill, freedom, justice. Banish from your thoughts all other considerations. This is possible if you perform each act as if it were your last, rejecting every frivolous distraction, every denial of the rule of reason, every pretentious gesture, vain show, and whining complaint against the decrees of fate. Do you see what little is required of a man to live a well-tempered and god-fearing life? Obey these precepts, and the gods will ask nothing more (II.5).
Marcus Aurelius (The Emperor's Handbook)
It’s not the word that’s important, it’s the right to say any word you want to and to form any sentence you want to, that’s the point and once they start to legally restrict what we can say and what we can’t say then we are on a slippery slope to authoritarianism.” “We’re talking about racists,” said Karen. “No one should be allowed to be racist,” said Mark. “But that’s not down to the Government or the courts,” said Rob desperately, “that should be down to us, we should make it difficult for people to be racist, we should frown upon such language and activity, it should be by peer pressure that we stop people from being abusive and unpleasant, not down to the Government.” “Why not?” demanded Karen, “they make the laws so it’s down to them to make the punishments.” “It’s not about punishment,” pressed Rob, “it’s about morality and social conscience, it’s about standing up for what’s right versus moral laziness, it’s about courage versus cowardice.
Arun D. Ellis (Daydream Believers)
The problem with law enforcement is not corruption, but an absolute denial of that corruption.
Abhijit Naskar (Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent)
I just listened to a man in total denial of the fact that he gunned down an innocent man.
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
It is well to remember that any man who denies justice to someone he hates prepares the way for a denial of justice to someone he loves.
Wendell L. Willkie
We've got to get on the same page before we can turn it. We've tried a do-it-yourself approach to writing the racial narrative about America, but the forces selling denial, ignorance, and projection have succeeded in robbing us of our own shared history--both the pain and the resilience. It's time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
Lament is honesty before God and each other. If something has truly been declared dead, there is no use in sugarcoating that reality. To hide from suffering and death would be an act of denial. If an individual would deny the reality of death during a funeral, friends would justifiably express concern over the mental health of that individual. In the same way, should we not be concerned over a church that lives in denial over the reality of death in our midst?
Soong-Chan Rah (Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times)
Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Whatever the "Christian conservatives" in America say, there is no one set of rightful opinions that follow on automatically from your belief. If you have signed up for the redeeming love of God, you don't—you really don't—have to sign up too for low taxes, creationism, gun ownership, the death penalty, closing abortion clinics, climate change denial and grotesque economic inequality. You are entirely at liberty to believe that the kingdom would be better served by social justice, redistributive taxation, feminism, gay rights and excellent public transportation. You won't have the authoritative sanction of the gospel for believing in those things either, of course. But you can.
Francis Spufford (Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense)
People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.
DaShanne Stokes
The fallout caused by denial was inherited by later generations of Armenians, linking them to the fateful days of 1915, and compelling them to set the record straight.
Michael Bobelian (Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justice)
Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can't live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on dogged pursuit of justice.
Ursula K. Le Guin (No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters)
Says the Cardinal: "Freethought leads to Atheism, to the destruction of social and civil order, and to the overthrow of government." I accept the gentleman's statement; I credit him with much intellectual acumen for perceiving that which many freethinkers have failed to perceive: accepting it, I shall do my best to prove it, and then endeavor to show that this very iconoclastic principle is the salvation of the economic slave and the destruction of the economic tyrant. ... Hence the freethinker who recognizes the science of astronomy, the science of mathematics, and the equally positive and exact science of justice, is logically forced to the denial of supreme authority. For no human being who observes and reflects can admit a supreme tyrant and preserve his self-respect. No human mind can accept the dogma of divine despotism and the doctrine of eternal justice at the same time; they contradict each other, and it takes two brains to hold them. The cardinal is right: freethought does logically lead to atheism, if by atheism he means the denial of supreme authority.
Voltairine de Cleyre (The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader)
When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people have generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honor (“shame” rather than “sin”); an heroic attitude toward life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacralization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of any “worlds beyond”; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of “justice” whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself. To paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life’s basic framework as unjust. In the pagan ethic of honor, the classic antithesis noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honorable vs. dishonorable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy, and so forth, replace the antithesis operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful, and so on. However, while all this appears to be accurate, the fundamental feature in my opinion is something else entirely. It lies in the denial of dualism.
Alain de Benoist (On Being a Pagan)
There should be a public outcry about what happened to me and other women in the name of our government! But history has shown “the customs of society and laws of the State allowed it to crush my aspirations and barred me from the the pursuit of almost every object worthy of an intelligent, rational mind.”45 What law has the right to entrust the interest of myself and my children into the hands of such an evil bunch of men? I did not occupy my rightful place in 1976. 45. (paraphrased from Gurko, Miriram, The Ladies of Seneca Falls; the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement, 1974.
Diane Chamberlain (Conduct Unbecoming: Rape, Torture, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Military Commanders)
Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
But no one leaves. - Let us set out once more on our native roads, burdened with my vice, that vice that since the age of reason has driven roots of suffering into my side - that towers to heaven, beats me, hurls me down, drags me on. Ultimate innocence, final timidity. All's said. Carry no more my loathing and treacheries before the world. Come on! Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger. Hire myself to whom? What beasts adore? What sacred images destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lie maintain? - Through what blood wade? Better to keep away from justice. - A hard life, outright stupor, - with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and suffocate. No old age this way, no danger: terror is very un-French. - Ah! I am so forsaken I will offer at any shrine impulses toward perfection. Oh my self-denial, my marvelous Charity! my Selfless love! And still here below! De Profundis Domine, what an ass I am!
Arthur Rimbaud (A Season in Hell)
He was about to cross a point of no return. The place separating him from the imaginary line in the sand. The one society demanded no one cross. He crossed the point on many occasions. This would be different. This could land him in prison or the electric chair. The prospect filled him with sexual energy he normally lacked
Jaime Allison Parker (Justice of the Fox)
The shadow self invariably presents itself as prudence, common sense, justice, or “I’m doing this for your own good,” when it is really manifesting fear, control, manipulation, or even vengeance…. Invariably, when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction, out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed, so watch for any over-reactions or over-denials.
Richard Rohr (Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life)
Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
Critical Social Justice texts—which form a kind of Gospel of Critical Social Justice—express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress without even a single person with racist or sexist intentions, sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.
Helen Pluckrose (Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories)
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
denial of review neither sets a precedent nor indicates that the Court agrees with the lower court’s judgment, points that are often misunderstood. There are many reasons that a petition might end up as “cert denied.” These include not only the occasional defensive denial but, more often, the absence of a real conflict or even a real legal issue (many petitions attempt to reargue the facts of a case) or the justices’ conclusion that a case with an interesting issue is nonetheless a “poor vehicle” due to any of a number of procedural problems.
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Anger was something that long puzzled Le Guin. In her 2014 essay “About Anger,” she writes: Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon—a tool useful only in combat and self-defence….Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice….Valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness.
Margaret Atwood (Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004-2022)
Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Finally, I had held up examples of Goldhagen's inflammatory language and suggested that he had missed the essence of what Primo Levi once called the 'grey zone' of human affairs, described by the historian Christopher Browning as that foggy universe of mixed motives, conflicting emotions, personal priorities, reluctant choices, opportunism and accomodation, all wedded, when convenient, to self-deception and denial. I thought that by marshalling his research into an overly narrow narrative, painted without nuance in black and white, the author had missed the human complexity and the ordinariness of racism.
Erna Paris (Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History)
Past is Prologue This book was written observing the premise that the seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims justice, or rob the living of a future. Generations of historians have enthusiastically gone about their craft knowing full well that 'he who owns the past, owns the future'. Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.
A.E. Samaan (From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848)
Affection produces happiness if—and only if—there is common sense and give and take and ‘decency’. In other words, only if something more, and other, than Affection is added. The mere feeling is not enough. You need ‘common sense’, that is, reason. You need ‘give and take’; that is, you need justice, continually stimulating mere Affection when it fades and restraining it when it forgets or would defy the art of love. You need ‘decency’. There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be. That is the whole point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection will ‘go bad on us’.
C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
Ethics has three levels, the good for self, the good for others, and the good for the transcendent purpose of a life.1 The good for self is the prudence by which you self-cultivate, learning to play the cello, say, or practicing centering prayer. Self-denial is not automatically virtuous. (How many self-denying mothers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: I’ll just sit here in the dark.) The good for a transcendent purpose is the faith, hope, and love to pursue an answer to the question “So what?” The family, science, art, the football club, God give the answers that humans seek. The middle level is attention to the good for others. The late first-century BCE Jewish sage Hillel of Babylon put it negatively yet reflexively: “Do not do unto others what you would not want done unto yourself.” It’s masculine, a guy-liberalism, a gospel of justice, roughly the so-called Non-Aggression Axiom as articulated by libertarians since the word “libertarian” was redirected in the 1950s to a (then) right-wing liberalism. Matt Kibbe puts it well in the title of his 2014 best seller, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.2 On the other hand, the early first-century CE Jewish sage Jesus of Nazareth put it positively: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s gal-liberalism, a gospel of love, placing upon us an ethical responsibility to do more than pass by on the other side. Be a good Samaritan. Be nice. In
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All)
People take time. But in our haste, we size them up or cut them down to what we take to be a more manageable size, labeling people instead of trying to hear, understand or welcome them. And we love our labels as ourselves even as they don't - and can't - do justice to the complexity of our own lived lives or anyone else's. It's as if we'll do anything to avoid the burden of having to think twice. To form an opinion about someone or something is to assert - or to believe we've asserted - some kind of control. And in the rush to opine, we degrade ourselves and whatever it is we'd like to think we've spoken meaningfully about and defensively stick to hastily prepared and unconvincing scripts, as others have before us, of radical denial.
David Dark (Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious)
Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts—forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice—that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist or sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms), sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized. That is the reification of the postmodern political principle. This approach distrusts categories and boundaries and seeks to blur them, and is intensely focused on language as a means of creating and perpetuating power imbalances. It exhibits a deep cultural relativism, focuses on marginalized groups, and has little time for universal principles or individual intellectual diversity.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
[Refers to 121 children taken into care in Cleveland due to suspected abuse (1987) and later returned to their parents] Sue Richardson, the child abuse consultant at the heart of the crisis, watched as cases began to unravel: “All the focus started to fall on the medical findings; other supportive evidence, mainly which we held in the social services department, started to be screened out. A situation developed where the cases either were proven or fell on the basis of medical evidence alone. Other evidence that was available to the court, very often then, never got put. We would have had statement from the child, the social workers and the child psychologist’s evidence from interviewing. We would have evidence of prior concerns, either from social workers or teachers, about the child’s behaviour or other symptoms that they might have been showing, which were completely aside from the medical findings. (Channel 4 1997) Ten years after the Cleveland crisis, Sue Richardson was adamant that evidence relating to children’s safety was not presented to the courts which subsequently returned those children to their parents: “I am saying that very clearly. In some cases, evidence was not put in the court. In other cases, agreements were made between lawyers not to put the case to the court at all, particularly as the crisis developed. Latterly, that children were sent home subject to informal agreements or agreements between lawyers. The cases never even got as far as the court. (Channel 4, 1997)” Nor is Richardson alone. Jayne Wynne, one of the Leeds paediatricians who had pioneered the use of RAD as an indicator of sexual abuse and who subsequently had detailed knowledge of many of the Cleveland children, remains concerned by the haphazard approach of the courts to their protection. I think the implication is that the children were left unprotected. The children who were being abused unfortunately returned to homes and the abuse may well have been ongoing. (Channel 4 1997)
Heather Bacon (Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas)
Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the “will to power,” to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “will to power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
If you want verification that God’s promises are kept, you will not find that verification among the new atheists who have reduced everything to a tight little package of reasonableness that easily explains everything away. Nor will we find verification among the fundamentalists who have God in such a box that there can be no room for inexplicable gifts. You will find verification among the daily performances of the trusting ones who live out their trust in ways that the world terms foolish: in a church ready to be venturesome into God’s future; in a church that pays attention to those disqualified by the capitalist system; in the acceptance of those who are unacceptable; in the commitment of time to neighbors when we prefer to have that time for ourselves; in the telling of hard truth about the world, and that in a culture of denial; in the slant toward justice and peacemaking in a world that loves violence and exploitation too much; in footing the bill for neighborliness and mercy when we have many other bills to pay; in lives that give testimony before the authorities who want to silence and intimidate and render others irrelevant.
Walter Brueggemann (A Way other than Our Own: Devotions for Lent)
Yes, I’m talking about a non-violent revolution of consciousness. A consciousness that is able to understand how we’re all inextricably connected to each other on this Earth, and to the Earth itself. And that if we violate those fundamental principles, we do so at our own peril. Yes, we can continue to live in this delusion and the denials of reality because it’s painful, it’s frightening. Sometimes, it’s terrifying. It's terrifying to face the truth. So I ask each of you to search your hearts, as to what your truth is, for being a citizen of the Earth, promoting justice as a foundation for peace. It’s not going to happen magically, it’s not going to happen by relying on these political structures and institutions. I think we’re going to have to wage peace in the most extraordinary ways whether our government wants it or not. Without a non-violent revolution of consciousness, we will not survive as a civilization or as a planet. We can choose to have peace if we want to pay the price. And what more glorious goal than peace for all people? ...To build a new society, a society that understands that we are not worth more, and they are not worth less. And that we will be willing to pay the price and take the risks to wage peace with all fellow and sister human beings.
S. Brian Willson
Letter to Law Enforcement Every field of human endeavor has its own unique problem. The problem with science is lack of warmth. The problem with philosophy is lack of empathy. The problem with religion is lack of reason. The problem with politics is lack of expertise. And the problem with law enforcement is not corruption, but an absolute denial of that corruption, and until you acknowledge that many of your officers are corrupt and prejudiced to the neck, you can never in a million years build a healthy relationship with the people. Prejudices thrive on biases, and biases are a part of our psyche - of the human psyche, and no matter what we do, we cannot erase them from our mind - but we do have the ability to be aware of them, and only when we are aware of them, can we choose whether or not to be driven by them. However, when you don't even acknowledge that you have biases, that you are filled with prejudice, then you are inadvertently choosing not to accept the root of all the mistakes committed by you and your fellow officers in the line of duty. A civilian may choose to stay biased and prejudiced all their life, but you as a defender of the people - as a defender of their rights, their security, their serenity - do not have the luxury to let your biases, to let your prejudices come in the way of your duty, for the moment they do, you the keeper of law and order, turn into the very cause of disorder. Therefore, it's not enough for an officer of the law to have combat training and legal knowledge, it is also imperative that you learn about biases, that you learn about the fears, insecurities and instinctual tendencies of the human mind. An officer of the law without an understanding of biases, is like a ten year old with a knife - they may feel that they have power, but they have no clue as to the real life implications of that power. Remember my friend, power that doesn't help the people, is not power but pandemic. Your combat training doesn't make you a police officer, for when enraged even an ordinary civilian can take down ten police officers - your knowledge of law doesn't make you an officer of the law, for when pushed even a mediocre college student can defeat an army of elite legal minds - what makes you a police officer is your absolute acceptance of your role in society - the role of selfless servants. Once you accept the role of selfless servants wholeheartedly, people are bound to trust you. My brave, conscientious officers of the law, if you want people to trust you, don't use the phrase "police are your friends", for it only makes you sound authoritarian, egotistical and condescending - instead, remind them "police are humans too" - acknowledge your mistakes and work towards correcting them, so that you can truly become the Caretaker of People, which is the very definition of COP.
Abhijit Naskar (Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent)
Poor Zélie! It was much her wont to declare about this time, that she was tired to death of a life of seclusion and labour; that she longed to have the means and leisure for relaxation; to have some one to work for her—a husband who would pay her debts (she was woefully encumbered with debt), supply her wardrobe, and leave her at liberty, as she said, to “goûter un peu les plaisirs.” It had long been rumoured, that her eye was upon M. Emanuel. Monsieur Emanuel’s eye was certainly often upon her. He would sit and watch her perseveringly for minutes together. I have seen him give her a quarter-of-an-hour’s gaze, while the class was silently composing, and he sat throned on his estrade, unoccupied. Conscious always of this basilisk attention, she would writhe under it, half-flattered, half-puzzled, and Monsieur would follow her sensations, sometimes looking appallingly acute; for in some cases, he had the terrible unerring penetration of instinct, and pierced in its hiding-place the last lurking thought of the heart, and discerned under florid veilings the bare; barren places of the spirit: yes, and its perverted tendencies, and its hidden false curves—all that men and women would not have known—the twisted spine, the malformed limb that was born with them, and far worse, the stain or disfigurement they have perhaps brought on themselves. No calamity so accursed but M. Emanuel could pity and forgive, if it were acknowledged candidly; but where his questioning eyes met dishonest denial—where his ruthless researches found deceitful concealment—oh, then, he could be cruel, and I thought wicked! he would exultantly snatch the screen from poor shrinking wretches, passionately hurry them to the summit of the mount of exposure, and there show them all naked, all false—poor living lies—the spawn of that horrid Truth which cannot be looked on unveiled. He thought he did justice; for my part I doubt whether man has a right to do such justice on man: more than once in these his visitations, I have felt compelled to give tears to his victims, and not spared ire and keen reproach to himself. He deserved it; but it was difficult to shake him in his firm conviction that the work was righteous and needed.
Charlotte Brontë (Villette)
Intellectual Fascism – 3/3 To make matters still worse, intellectual fascist frequently demand of themselves, as well as others, perfect competence and universal achievement. If they are excellent mathematicians or dancers, they demand that they be the most accomplished. If they are outstanding scientists or manufacturers, they also must be first-rate painters or writers. If they are fine poets, they not only need to be the finest, but likewise must be great lovers, drawing room wits, and political experts. Naturally, only being human, they fail at many or most of these ventures. And then - O, poetic justice! - they apply to themselves the same excoriations and despisements that they apply to others when they fail to be universal geniuses. However righteous their denials, therefore - and even though readers who be now are not squirming with guilt are probably screaming with indignation, I will determinedly continue - the typical politico-social "liberals" of our day are fascistic in several significant ways. For they arbitrarily define certain human traits as "good" or "superior"; they automatically exclude most others from any possibility of achieving their "good" standards; they scorn, combat, and in many ways persecute those who do not live up to these capricious goals; and finally, in most instances they more or less fail to live up to their own definitional standards and bring down neurotic self-pity and blame on their own heads. .... What is the alternative? Assuming that intellectual fascism exists on a wide scale today, and that it does enormous harm and little good to people's relations with themselves and others, what philosophy of living are they to set up in its place? Surely, you may well ask, I am not suggesting an uncritical, sentimental equalitarianism, whereunder everyone would fully accept and hobnob with everyone else and where no one would attempt to excel or perfect himself at anything? No, I am not. On the contrary, significant human differences (as well as sameness) exists; and they add much variety and zest to living; and that one human may sensibly cultivate the company of another just because this other is different from, and perhaps in certain respects superior to, others. At the same time, "one's worth as a human being is not to be measured in terms of one's popularity, success, achievement, intelligence, or any other such trait, but solely in terms of one's Humanity".
Albert Ellis
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. . . . At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed. There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government--the Government of the greatest Nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ?" There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. . . . But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." -Lyndon B. Johnson, 15 March 1965
Andrew Aydin John Lewis
With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.
Alexander McClelland
Grieving requires softening your self-protective defense mechanisms enough to feel: getting beyond the denial, numbness, righteousness, apathy, and other obstacles we have put In place to avoid the depths of pain. The humanity that was previously made invisible must be made visible again.
Edgar Villanueva (Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance)
Unlike wellness or witchcraft, social justice culture has it all. It’s capable of taking American intuitionalism and giving it a clear shape, a clear theology. It provides a compelling nontheistic vision of why the world is the way it is, locating original sin in the structures of society itself and liberation in self-examination and solidarity. It provides a clear-cut enemy: Donald Trump, and the scores of straight white men like him who have benefited from a corrupted status quo. It provides a sense of purpose: the call to self-love (for the marginalized) and to self-denial (for the unduly privileged). It provides a framework for legitimizing emotion, rather than oppressive rationality, as the source of moral knowledge; the discourse of lived experience and embodied identity reaffirm the importance of subjectivity. In the absence of transcendent notions of the soul, or of a universal, knowable truth, or of an objective foundation of being, social justice provides a coherent framework about why and how our personal experiences are authoritative. And it has succeeded in galvanizing a moral community—a church—through its ideology and its rituals of purgation and renewal. If social justice is indeed America’s new civil religion—or, at least, one of them—it comes by that claim fairly. In
Tara Isabella Burton (Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World)
There are all sorts of examples of how we have been urged to take on trust a variety of extraordinary claims. Practitioners of 'Fat Studies' maintain that there are no authentic health risks to obesity, and that the seemingly irrefutable evidence to the contrary is the product of the inherent bigotry of the scientific method. An image of an individual with a bloodstained crotch is shared online to prove that men can menstruate, when we can all quite clearly see that this is a biological female who identifies as male. According to the new puritans, the observable realities of existence are a mirage. Only they have access to the truth, and we are all invited to jettison verifiable facts and nod along. Is this really any different from a preacher who insists that his supernatural interpretation of the world must be uncritically accepted without any evidence to support it?
Andrew Doyle (The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World)
We cannot change the past, but we can learn from it. As platitudinous as this might sound, it is worth reiterating at a time when cultural revolutionaries are promoting a tunnel-visioned approach to history and the arts. An alternative reality based on a denial of the past is no kind of reality at all.
Andrew Doyle (The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World)
Every indignity that comes from the denial of reproductive autonomy can be found in slave women’s lives – the harms of treating women’s wombs as procreative vessels, of policies that pit a mother’s welfare against that of her unborn child, and of government attempts to manipulate women’s child-bearing decisions through threats and bribes.
Dorothy Roberts (Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty)
You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. “You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I—I am the man who has granted you your wish. “Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind. “Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn’t. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren’t. “While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem—I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality—mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Things in any shape, like love, promise, law, and justice, if that's going to delay, I take that as a denial and hope for any best outcome; otherwise, it is a waste of time and making yourself deliberately a fool.
Ehsan Sehgal
I know more than one genius organizer, usually a Black or brown, sick or disabled woman or non-binary person who doesn't have a ton of disability community, who's casually told me that they'll be dead by the age of fifty. I respect that crip years are like dog years and sometimes we live really huge lives in short amounts of time. But I can't help but think that it doesn't have to be that way. We're soaked since birth in narratives that we will die young, that our lives aren't worth living, and we're up against everything from insurance denials to police trying to kill us who want to do the same damn thing. But as I hear my friends talking about how they're sure they'll die young, I wonder if changing the narratives around care might change their expectations.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice)
The biggest violation of rights is in the denial of justice sheltered under the pretense of the rule of law.
Bhuwan Ribhu
the
Mark Shaw (Denial of Justice: Dorothy Kilgallen, Abuse of Power, and the Most Compelling JFK Assassination Investigation in History)
There is no space made for accountability; no space for people to take on board the harm they've done or to work to try to rectify or repair the situation. Simply locking people up will not teach them about male supremacy, toxic masculinity, consent and why sexual violence occurs in our societies. Further, the system breeds denial and actually reinforces a lack of accountability from those who have committed harm - think of the defence attorney appointed on behalf of accused perpetrators to vehemently deny any wrongdoing. The concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' reigns supreme, with all efforts going towards maintaining innocence rather than encouraging accountability. Wealthy, powerful men are taught to sue those who accuse them in any public capacity.
Catriona Morton (The Way We Survive: Notes on Rape Culture)
This is especially poignant when one thinks about social fragmentation. So-called “interracial” adoption is a lovely thing in basic human terms. Yet not long ago, Ibram Kendi tweeted this amid media coverage of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of “black” children (two from Haiti): Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.19 Kendi then argued that adopting such children in no way makes someone “not a racist”: And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.20 A writer for Christianity Today, Sitara Roden, spoke of her own adoptive background in a positive way, but also agreed with Kendi’s perspective on bias: This is a conversation I’ve had with my own white family. Just because I am not white and a part of their family does not mean their implicit biases are any less real. How you view the nonwhite person in your family, that you might have raised, is bound to be a different valuation than
Owen Strachan (Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It)
The world calls us to self-indulgence, but Jesus calls us to self-denial. The world calls us to seek our own glory, but Jesus calls us to seek God’s glory. The world calls us to pursue a greatness involving accolades and recognition, but Jesus redefines greatness as serving others and calls us to serve without any praise. The world calls us to pursue riches, but Jesus tells us that abundance has nothing to do with possessions. The world calls us to demand justice, but Jesus calls us to demonstrate mercy.
Adam Hamilton (Not a Silent Night: Mary Looks Back to Bethlehem)
The things in any shape, as like love, promise, law, and justice, if that's going the delay, I take that as a denial, and hoping for any best outcome of it; otherwise, it is wasting of time and making yourself deliberately a fool.
Ehsan Sehgal
The First World War (Sonnet 1501) There are bigger villains than Adolf, But they are not deemed villain so long as they do white man no harm. Two world wars count for nothing, compared to the struggles of the rest of the world. You only hear of two world wars, not more, Because world history is actually white history. White welfare has always been default human welfare, Like today we humans deem animal welfare secondary. Even the world map as you know is one big lie, depicting an exaggerated size of the global north. Rather than arguing over the planethood of Pluto, How about you right the wrongs right here on earth! Endeavor as human and reclaim your humanhood, Work for actual human welfare, defying white denial. There never was a world war, there was only white war, The first world war has just begun, against violation.
Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets)
Ehsan Sehgal Quotes about Media — — — * Words matter and mirror if your head is a dictionary of insight and your feelings are alive. * Sure, fake news catches and succeeds attention, but for a while; however, it embraces disregard and unreliability forever. * Media rule the incompetent minds and pointless believers. * A real journalist only states, neither collaborates nor participates. * The majority of journalists and anchors have the information only but not the sense of knowledge. * When the media encourages and highlights the wrong ones, anti-democratic figures, criminals in uniform, and dictators in a supreme authority and brilliant context, sure, such a state never survives the breakdown of prosperity and civil rights, as well as human rights. Thus, the media is accountable and responsible for this as one of the democratic pillars. *Media cannot be a football ground or a tool for anyone. It penetrates the elementary pillar of a state, it forms and represents the language of entire humanity within its perception of love, peace, respect, justice, harmony, and human rights, far from enmity and distinctions. Accordingly, it demonstrates its credibility and neutrality. * When the non-Western wrongly criticizes and abuses its culture, religion, and values, the Western media highlights that often, appreciating in all dimensions. However, if the same one even points out only such subjects, as a question about Western distinctive attitude and role, the West flies and falls at its lowest level, contradicting its principles of neutrality and freedom of press and speech, which pictures, not only double standards but also double dishonesty with itself and readers. Despite that, Western media bother not to realize and feel ignominy and moral and professional stigma. * Social Media has become the global dustbin of idiocy and acuity. It stinks now. Anyone is there to separate and recycle that. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean to constitute insulting, abusing, and harming deliberately in a distinctive and discriminative feature and context, whereas supporting such notions and attempts is a universal crime. * Social media is a place where you share your favourite poetry, quotes, songs, news, social activities, and reports. You can like something, you can comment, and you can use humour in a civilised way. It is social media, but it is not a place to love or be loved. Any lover does not exist here, and no one is serious in this regard. Just enjoy yourself and do not try to fool anyone. If you do that, it means you are making yourself a fool; it is a waste of time, and it is your defeat too. * I use social media only to devote and denote my thoughts voluntarily for the motivation of knowledge, not to earn money as greedy-minded. * One should not take seriously the Social-Media fools and idiots. * Today, on social media, how many are on duty? * Journalists voluntarily fight for human rights and freedom of speech, whereas they stay silent for their rights and journalistic freedom on the will and restrictions of the boss of the media. Indeed, it verifies that The nearer the church, the farther from god. * The abuse, insult, humiliation, and discrimination against whatever subject is not freedom of expression and writing; it is a violation and denial of global harmony and peace. * Press freedom is one significant pillar of true democracy pillars, but such democracy stays deaf, dumb, and blind, which restricts or represses the media. * Press and speech that deliberately trigger hatred and violation fall not under the freedom of press and speech since restrictions for morale and peace apply to everyone without exemption. * Real press freedom is just a dream, which nowhere in the world becomes a reality; however, journalists stay dreaming that.
Ehsan Sehgal
Justice is justice. And the denial of justice for any one group of people erodes justice for all people. Attacks on the rights of transgender people to access health care are tied to assaults on abortion rights, as both are grounded in a fight for sexual autonomy, a tug-of-war with the government over control of our own bodies. The fight for immigrant rights is an LGBTQ+ fight, too, because it is a collective demand for human-centered politics that treat people with a basic level of decency. And the work of dismantling systemic racism is ours as well. The queer community includes people of color. And when the state is empowered to defend white supremacy, violently and brutally, all of our lives are on the line. To paraphrase Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Maya Angelou: so long as a single person has not been liberated, none of us has truly been liberated.
Brandon J. Wolf (A Place for Us: A Memoir)
The denial of Oak Park’s facilities to Negroes does not accord with fundamental and inherent principles of justice and equality,” the petition said. When the city refused, Fred Gray filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court. But this time the city did not wait for a protest movement to take shape. They viewed integration as a dangerous, highly contagious disease, and they felt they had no choice but to close every one of the city’s public parks lest that disease spread. Grass and weeds soon swallowed Oak Park. Workers filled its waterways with dirt. The city sold its zoo animals. The fences around the park, one newspaper editorial said, would serve as a warning to Montgomery’s Black citizens: this is what happens when you make demands.
Jonathan Eig (King: A Life)
The funeral dirge does not allow for the denial of death, nor does it allow for the denial of culpability in that death. The funeral dirge is a reality check for those who witness suffering and allows mourning that is essential for dealing with death.
Soong-Chan Rah (Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times)
There is power in bringing untold stories to light. The freedom to speak about the reality of suffering and death results in a freedom from denial. Lamentations 1 presents as a funeral dirge to remind us that we cannot ignore what is right in front of us.
Soong-Chan Rah (Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times)
War is unlike life,” he said. “It’s a denial of everything you learn life is. And that’s why when you get finished with it, you see that it offers no lessons that can’t be better learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget. A disconnect needs to be made to get yourself cleansed.” His children were after him for thirty-five years to talk about it. “I refused. I said ‘Read it in the history books. I can’t do it justice.’ We were closed up tight as a clam.
James D. Hornfischer (Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal)
Crime statistics are the first refuge of the reporters and public officials in denial about racial violence. But here is what they do not know or do not say: Violent crime is often not reported. A 2012 study from the Department of Justice says more than half the victims of violent crime do not call the police. And if they do, police often do not file crime reports. “More than half of the nation’s violent crimes, or nearly 3.4 million violent victimizations per year, went unreported to the police between 2006 and 2010,” said a Justice Department analysis.1
Colin Flaherty ('White Girl Bleed A Lot': The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It)
you will see a world mired in denial, dread, and learned helplessness, dominated by a media that keeps us enslaved in the most trivial and decadent distractions at the very moment when we desperately need to be galvanized by authentic information and inspired by authentic spirituality.
Chris Saade (Second Wave Spirituality: Passion for Peace, Passion for Justice (Sacred Activism Book 5))
He comes next to a consideration of the passions. 'Endeavour' may be defined as a small beginning of motion; if towards something, it is desire, and if away from something it is aversion. Love is the same as desire, and hate is the same as aversion. We call a thing 'good' when it is an object of desire, and 'bad' when it is an object of aversion. (It will be observed that these definitions give no objectivity to 'good' and 'bad'; if men differ in their desires, there is no theoretical method of adjusting their differences.) There are definitions of various passions, mostly based on a competitive view of life; for instance, laughter is sudden glory. Fear of invisible power, if publicly allowed, is religion; if not allowed, superstition. Thus the decision as to what is religion and what superstition rests with the legislator. Felicity involves continual progress; it consists in prospering, not in having prospered; there is no such thing as a static happiness—excepting, of course, the joys of heaven, which surpass our comprehension. Will is nothing but the last appetite or aversion remaining in deliberation. That is to say, will is not something different from desire and aversion, but merely the strongest in a case of conflict. This is connected, obviously, with Hobbes's denial of free will. Unlike most defenders of despotic government, Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire dominion over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From their conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life 'nasty, brutish, and short'. In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and 'force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues'. The second part tells how men escape from these evils by combining into communities each subject to a central authority. This is represented as happening by means of a social contract. It is supposed that a number of people come together and agree to choose a sovereign, or a sovereign body, which shall exercise authority over them and put an end to the universal war.
Anonymous
Though the law itself be fair on its face, and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations, between persons in similar circumstances . . . the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.1 Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Planning and control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom. No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.35 The
David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism)
Denials of personhood to categories of human beings have been used throughout history to subjugate, oppress, and extinguish groups of people that those in power wanted to eliminate. History gives us little reason to believe that denying personhood to some human beings has ever been used to further justice or equality. In fact, in every instance it has been used in precisely the opposite way.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Failure to grant a minority group a place for a crematorium or religious services is a denial of a fundamental human right.
Qamar Rafiq
Bless Me With Bullets (The Sonnet) Just once let me die for the people, Then I can live in peace. Once I am wiped out for the world, Then I can have my long awaited sleep. Only when a bunch of bravehearts are sleepless, Can the rest of humanity sleep in peace. Only when a bunch of reformers are peaceless, Will all the inequalities be appeased. To hell with personal happiness! To hell with the notion of personal and social! There is no person, there is no planet, Till the troubles of the world feel super personal. Come all ye offended, charge at me with your entire arsenal. I won't resist, come and bless me, with your bullets of denial.
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts -forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice- that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist of sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms). sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
Koestler wrote more than seven decades ago, so surely we have learned our lesson by now. But when the Burmese military attempts to eradicate the Rohingya people of Myanmar; when the Chinese government locks up over a million Muslim Uighurs in prison camps across Xinjiang; when white supremacists march on an American city chanting “Jews will not replace us”; and when Holocaust denial is enjoying a resurgence, we are reminded that every day each of us has a duty to bear witness, to seek accountability, to pursue justice, and to act in the spirit of Jan Karski.
Clark Young (Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski)
The question is not that; what defines Constitution? The question is what is the credibility of the right of Suo-Motu, and the rejection of the full bench of the judiciary, which executes misuse of the judicial right and the deliberate denial of the transparent justice and juristic system. It also openly proves judicial conspiracy and jurisdictional martial law.
Ehsan Sehgal
Since the term "fairy tale" by definition implies unreality, censorship can be minimal, especially if in the end good triumphs over evil, justice reigns, the sinner is punished, and the good person is rewarded; that is, if denial undoes the tale's insights into the truth. For the world is not just, goodness is seldom rewarded, and the cruelest deeds are selddom punished. Yet we tell all this to our children, who, like us, would naturally like to believe that the world is the way we are presenting it to them. (...) At the same time, there need be no fear of offending anyone, for the original author is unknown, the story has been recast countless times, and the truth has often been turned upside down, although sometimes it has managed to remain intact because it is so well hidden behind an innocuous mask that no one has been upset by it.
Alice Miller
Telling people that they are racist—on the basis of immutable characteristics, using incomprehensible definitions that they may not know or understand—then claiming they are “fragile” and in denial when they try to defend themselves, or accusing them of “gaslighting” when they don’t agree with you, is a punitive way of treating people, whatever their colour.
Dr Val Thomas (Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice)
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colourblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of colour 'criminals' and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African-Americans. Once you're labelled a felon, the old forms of discrimination, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Because it happened. Remembering it is all we have in the face of denial. Silence is the enemy of justice,
Aline Ohanesian (Orhan's Inheritance)
I think about all my patients who've died. Older people, most of them. But not all. Looking back, I try to remember if the young ones were marked somehow. Whether they might have done something to bring their fates down on themselves. But they didn't, Danny. One day God or Fate just said, 'I will not let you be happy. I will not give you children. I will not let you breathe another day. I will take away your ability to move."'" "Warren-" "No, listen. This is important. I've tried to believe, all my life. To have faith that there was justice in life, some larger plan or meaning. But I can't do it any more. I've watched some of the best people I ever met get crippled or taken before they reached thirty, forty, whatever. Babies, too. I've watched babies die of leuke mia. I've watched infants die from infections, bleeding from their eyes and ears. Terrible birth defects...I look for a reason, a pattern, anything that might justify all that. But nothing does. Nothing does. Until I got sick myself, I played the same game of denial that all doctors do. But, Danny, my cancer ripped the scales from my eyes. I go to these funerals and listen to smug preachers telling grieving people that God has a plan. Well, that's a lie. All my life I've followed the rules. I've toed the line, given to the less fortunate, followed the Commandments . . . and it hasn't mattered one bit. And don't tell me about Job, okay? If you tell me God is testing me by killing me... that's like saying we had to destroy a village in order to save it. It's a cruel joke that we play on ourselves. And don't tell me it's all made right in the afterlife, because you know what? The agony of one infant dying senselessly mocks all the golden trumpets of heaven. I don't want to sit at the right hand of a God who can torture children, or even one who sits by and allows them to be tortured. Free will, my ass. I made no choice to die at thirty seven. This one's on God's account, Major. We look for meaning where there is none, because we're too afraid to accept randomness. Well, I've accepted it. Embraced it, even. And once you do that, the world just doesn't look the same anymore.
Greg Iles (Third Degree)
Death, to the ancient Egyptians, was not an end; it was a continuation of the life already lived. In the underworld, the spirit ultimately faced judgment by Osiris, its leader. After offering up a list of denials of wrongdoing, the truth of the matter was tested: The spirit’s heart was placed on one side of a scale, and a feather—the symbol of truth and justice—was placed on the other. If the scales were balanced, the eternal life of the person’s spirit would be much like that of an abundant earthly life, surrounded by riches, servants, and plenty of food and drink. Those who failed the test had their hearts fed to Ammut, “the Devourer”—a beast that was part crocodile, part lion, and part hippo—and their souls cast into darkness.
Fiona Davis (The Stolen Queen)
Terrorism is the result of injustice and denial of other's rights. You cannot defeat that, with another terrorism, even you have the vote to do it. For that, only the way is; give the rights and do the justice with respect.
Ehsan Sehgal
The USA way of life — the way we socialize violence in our citizens via larger institutional or structural forces (e.g., entertainment, demonizing populations, denial of opportunities, narrow group privileging, militaristic foreign policies, and invasions of other nations) — encourages violence even as we as a nation ignore, deny, and/or rationalize these events as unimportant or incidental to what is occurring. Individual and collective acts of violence and crime by those in power and position are too often dismissed, tolerated, and/or approved across political, economic, educational, military, and moral
Anthony J. Marsella (War, Peace, Justice: An Unfinished Tapestry . . .)