top of page
Exlpore more Justice quotes

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

"When you a get a job you are not qualified for, it will be evil to you and to your community."

"The corrupt system made the ordinary citizen absolutely powerless and without rights."

"It doesn't matter who is in control of the country, people will continue to break the law and reap the consequences."

"The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter."

"If we don't confront those things that are wrong, it gets worse."

"The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple."
Explore more quotes by William Gaddis


"What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?"


"There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work."


"We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are."


"I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge."


"He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played."


"How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me."
bottom of page