Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice advocate, and author. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization that works to end mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial inequality. His work has been widely praised, and his inspiring quotes provide insight into his views on justice and equality. Whether you’re looking for motivation or insight into the fight for justice, the following from Bryan Stevenson Quotes are sure to inspire.
The Best Bryan Stevenson Famous Quotes
“All of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Are you the sum total of your worst acts?” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Because my great-grandparents were enslaved people, the legacy of slavery was something that didn’t seem impersonal or disconnected. That’s what motivated me to get into law.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“But simply punishing the broken–walking away from them or hiding them from sight–only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Embracing a certain quotient of racial bias and discrimination against the poor is an inexorable aspect of supporting capital punishment. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment.” ~ Bryan Stevenson quotes
◼“Finally I got to the point where I said, I’d like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I do talk and think a lot about the legacy before me. I feel like if I didn’t know that people had been in Montgomery sixty years ago trying to do similar things that I’m trying to do, with a lot less, with fewer resources, with less security, with less encouragement, with less opportunity – if I didn’t know that, then I think doing what I do would be much, much harder.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I don’t think there’s been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I love museums, and I think they’re fantastic, but they don’t touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I say this thing about how I’ve never had to say my head is bloodied but not bowed, like everybody who came before me had to say. And that tells me that I can do a lot more than I think I can.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I talk about my grandmother a lot because she’s an amazing person – not in some dramatic, distinct, unique way, but anybody who is the daughter of enslaved people and who has found a way to be hopeful and create love and value justice and seek peace is a remarkable person.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I think there is a contempt for the human dignity of people who were enslaved. You couldn’t see them as fully human and so you didn’t respect their desire to be connected to a family and a place. That was the only way you could tolerate and make sense of lynching and the terror that lynching represented.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I’m persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“I’ve come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I believe that for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they’re not just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn’t belong to them, they’re not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. And because of that, there’s this basic human dignity that must be respected by law.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“If we want to be proud of our country, if we want to be proud as Americans, if we want to be proud of our history, then we can’t talk about the things that are inconsistent with pride, about which we can have no pride.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“If you love your community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“If you’re just the person with power, exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you’re going to be an operative of injustice and inequality.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“In a landscape littered with all of this imagery about the nobility of the Civil War and the Confederate effort and struggle, the absence of markers says something really powerful.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“In many ways, we’ve been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they’ve committed? And that’s a very sensible question. But there’s another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill?” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Intuitively we all like to seek the things that are comfortable rather than uncomfortable. But I do think there is a way of saying that if I believe in justice and I believe that justice is a constant struggle, and if I want to create justice, then I have to get comfortable with struggle.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“It can be a challenge, but my legacy, at least for the people who came before me, is you don’t run from challenges because that’s more comfortable and convenient.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“It’s that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzling things but also the dark and difficult things.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Living in Montgomery, I’ve been antagonized by the emergence of a narrative about our history that I believe is quite false and misleading, and actually dangerous. And the narrative that emerges when you spend time in the South – places likes Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana – is that we have always been a noble, wonderful, glorious region of the country, with wonderful, noble, glorious people doing wonderful, noble, glorious things. And there’s great pride in the Alabamians of the nineteenth century.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Montgomery’s unique role in the domestic slave trade was that it was the first community that had a rail line that connected the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic region.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
“My parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that’s how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Part of the reason why we’re only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Sometimes the facts of the crime are so distracting – there’s been some tragic murder or horrific incident, and people aren’t required to think as carefully and thoughtfully, and directly, about this legacy of racial inequality and structural poverty. And what it’s contributing to these wrongful convictions.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“That’s what’s provocative to me – that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.” ~ Bryan Stevenson quotes
◼“The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison – that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don’t fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“The landscape in Montgomery and in the South is just saturated with imagery. Markers are everywhere. There’s a marker for the first Confederate post office, there’s a marker for a ball that Robert E. Lee hosted, there’s a marker for where Jefferson Davis had a meeting. We love reminding people about all that was going on in the mid-nineteenth century.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don’t believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“There were people in the South who were ardently opposed to slavery. And maybe, if we get into truth and reconciliation, those will be the people we want to name schools and streets after.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“We all have a responsibility to create a just society” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“We don’t need police officers who see themselves as warriors. We need police officers who see themselves as guardians and parts of the community. You can’t police a community that you’re not a part of.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.” ~ Bryan Stevenson quotes
◼“We’ve all been acculturated into accepting the inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and racial disparities and discrimination against the poor.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“When you come to Montgomery, you see fifty-nine monuments and memorials, all about the Civil War, all about Confederate leaders and generals. We have lionized these people, and we have romanticized their courage and their commitment and their tenacity, and we have completely eliminated the reality that created the Civil War.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“Why do we want to kill all the broken people?” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“You can be a career professional as a judge, a prosecutor, sometimes as a defense attorney, and never insist on fairness and justice. That’s tragic and that’s what we have to change.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“You can’t demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth – people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“You don’t change the world with the ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
◼“You ultimately judge the civility of a society not by how it treats the rich, the powerful, the protected and the highly esteemed, but by how it treats the poor, the disfavored and the disadvantaged.” ~ Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Justice
◼“I may be old, I may be poor, I may be Black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.”
◼“It is a paradox for a society that talks about freedom & equality to be so comfortable with having the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We’ve got 4% of the planet’s population, but nearly 25% of the planet’s imprisoned. And nobody seems to feel bad about that.”
◼“It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us.”
“Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument” — Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Mercy
◼“I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.” — Bryan Stevenson
◼“It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent — strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration.”
◼“Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion.” — Bryan Stevenson
“Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.”
“We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.”
◼“But simply punishing the broken — walking away from them or hiding them from sight — only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Hope
“But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.” — Bryan Stevenson
◼“Hope is kind of an orientation of the spirit; it’s how you position yourself in places where there’s a lot of despair.” — Bryan Stevenson, on the podcast Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen.
◼“Hopelessness is the enemy of justice. Hope allows us to push for word, even when the truth is distorted by the people in power. It allows us to stand when they tell us to sit down, and to speak when they say be quiet.”
◼“I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”
◼“The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.” — Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Motivation
◼“It can be a challenge, but my legacy, at least for the people who came before me, is you don’t run from challenges because that’s more comfortable and convenient.”
◼“There’s always something we can do. Whatever you did, your life is still meaningful.” — Bryan Stevenson
◼“We are all implicated when we allow others to be mistreated.” — Bryan Stevenson
◼“When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don’t actually believe makes sense. We can get them to do things that they don’t think they can do.”
◼“You should not underestimate the power you have to affirm the humanity and dignity of the people around you. When you do that, they will teach you something about what you need to learn about human dignity, but also what you can do to be a change agent.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes About Law
◼“Most parents have long understood that kids don’t have the judgment, the maturity, the impulse control and insight necessary to make complicated lifelong decisions.”
◼“I’m persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.”
◼“I love museums, and I think they’re fantastic, but they don’t touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.”
◼“You don’t change the world with the ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.”
◼“We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.”
◼“Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.”
◼“Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?”
◼“Intuitively we all like to seek the things that are comfortable rather than uncomfortable.”
◼“Increasingly, I was recognizing the importance of hopefulness in creating justice.”
◼“There’s always something we can do. Whatever you did, your life is still meaningful.”
◼“The first time I visited Death Row, I wasn’t expecting to meet someone the same age as me… from a neighborhood just like ours coulda been me.”
◼“I came out of law school with grand ideas in my mind about how to change the world. But Mr. McMillian made me realize we can’t change the world with only ideas in our minds. We need conviction in our hearts. This man taught me how to stay hopeful, because I now know that hopelessness is the enemy of justice. Hope allows us to push for word, even when the truth is distorted by the people in power. It allows us to stand when they tell us to sit down, and to speak when they say be quiet.”
Motivating Bryan Stevenson Quotes
◼“Always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing.”
◼“But simply punishing the broken – walking away from them or hiding them from sight – only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
◼“But Walter’s case also taught me something else: there is light within this darkness.”
◼“Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment.”
◼“Fear and anger are a threat to justice. They can infect a community, a state, or a nation, and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous.”
◼“I do think there is a way of saying that if I believe in justice and I believe that justice is a constant struggle, and if I want to create justice, then I have to get comfortable with struggle.”
◼“The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
◼“The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.”
◼“We all have a responsibility to create a just society.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 1
◼“An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive, abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others.”
◼“capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment.”
◼“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
◼“Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated.”
◼“It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us.”
◼“My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
◼“Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
◼“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice…The real question of capital punishment in this country is, not do they deserve to die, but do we deserve to kill?”
◼“The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
◼“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,”
Quotes From Just Mercy With Page Numbers Chapter 5
◼“We would never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape, or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”
◼“What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 6
◼“We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 10
◼“America’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.”
◼“Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 11
◼“Havel had said that people struggling for independence wanted money and recognition from other countries; they wanted more criticism of the Soviet empire from the West and more diplomatic pressure. But Havel had said that these were things they wanted; the only thing they needed was hope. Not that pie in the sky stuff, not a preference for optimism over pessimism, but rather “an orientation of the spirit.” The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.”
◼“I’d grown fond of quoting Václav Havel, the great Czech leader who had said that “hope” was the one thing that people struggling in Eastern Europe needed during the era of Soviet domination.
◼“The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 12
◼“Most incarcerated women—nearly two-thirds—are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison. “Three strikes” laws have also played a considerable role. I started challenging conditions of confinement at Tutwiler in the mid-1980s as a young attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. At the time, I was shocked to find women in prison for such minor offenses. One of the first incarcerated women I ever met was a young mother who was serving a long prison sentence for writing checks to buy her three young children Christmas gifts without sufficient funds in her account. Like a character in a Victor Hugo novel, she tearfully explained her heartbreaking tale to me. I couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying until I checked her file and discovered that she had, in fact, been convicted and sentenced to over ten years in prison for writing five checks, including three to Toys “R” Us. None of the checks was for more than $150. She was not unique. Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of
◼“untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 14
◼“Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 15
◼“But simply punishing the broken–walking away from them or hiding them from sight–only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
◼“Mrs. Parks (Rosa Parks) turned to me sweetly and asked, ‘Now, Bryan, tell me who you are and what you’re doing.’ I looked at Ms. Carr to see if I had permission to speak, and she smiled and nodded at me. I then gave Ms. Parks my rap. ‘Yes, ma’am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice…Ms. Parks leaned back smiling. ‘Ooooh, honey, all that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.’ We all laughed. I looked down, a little embarrassed. Then Ms. Carr leaned forward and put her finger in my face and talked o me just like my grandmother used to talk to me. She said, ‘That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.’ All three women nodded in silent agreement and for just a little while, they made me feel like a young prince.”
◼“Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.”
◼“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration.”
◼“There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”
◼“There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
◼“We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
◼“We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.”
◼“We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
◼“Why do we want to kill all the broken people?”
Bryan Stevenson Quotes On Just Mercy Chapter 16
◼“All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care. I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here [at the court] to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.’
◼“I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.”
◼“Of course innocent mistakes occur, but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden born by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice.”
◼“Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about how we were dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in the United States after the 9/11 attacks. An older African American man once said to me, “You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.”
Verdict
Bryan Stevenson Quotes are a powerful reminder of the importance of justice, empowering marginalized voices, and challenging the status quo. They serve as a call to action to make the world a better place and to create a more equitable system of justice. His work and words have inspired many people to stand up for what is right and to create a more just society. We must all work to ensure that Bryan Stevenson’s words and work live on.