Right Thing, Right Now

He once quoted the poet Horace from memory: “The man who is just and firm of purpose can be shaken from his stern resolve neither by the rage of the people who urge him to crime nor by the countenance of the threatening tyrant.”

as the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper would explain in a New York church immediately following the Civil War, justice was not fulfilled if anyone was unequal before the law. “We are all bound together,” she said, “in one great bundle of humanity.” Our fates are tied up with each other’s, she understood, and the sooner people realize that, the be

“Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts,” C. S. Lewis would remind listeners in a famous lecture series. “It is the old name for everything we should now call ‘fairness’; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, and all that side of life.”

We keep our word to ourselves—that’s discipline. We keep our word to others because it’s justice.

That’s one of the ways you get allies—by looking like someone they can do business with. You could argue that this is unfair, that appearances shouldn’t matter, that people should be able to dress and behave however they want, that the only thing that should matter is a person’s character and the righteousness of their cause. And guess what? In arg

To the person you’re saving, to the person whose burden you are lessening? There is nothing “small” about it. When the Talmud says that he who saves one person saves the world, maybe that’s partly what they meant—because you certainly save that person’s whole world.

“I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three month stay in England and Europe,” Gandhi observed after one of his visits, “that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter what clime it flourishes.”

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius would write that “what doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” When we close ourselves off to love and hope, naturally we experience less love and hope. “Whoever hardens their heart,” the Bible reminds us, “falls into trouble.” We create our own darkness.

Once in prison, they refused to comply further, undergoing hunger strikes nearly to the point of death. In a famous speech, which took its example from Cato, who died rather than serve Caesar, Pankhurst explained that she refused to accept the legitimacy of a government that so deprived its citizens. “You can kill that woman,” she said of herself a

No one throws you a parade when you do the right thing. Karma, as much as we’d like for it to be true, has a funny way of not coming around.