Top 97 Bryan Stevenson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed for every three hundred Americans; fifty years later, it was one bed for every three thousand.
Bryan Stevenson
#4. 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
#5. ...I understood that even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, we're also in a web of healing and mercy.
Bryan Stevenson
#6. 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
#7. All this grievin' is hard. We can't cheer for that man you trying to help but don't want to have to grieve for him, too. There shouldn't be no more killing behind this.
Bryan Stevenson
#8. 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
#9. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain't right. People are supposed to die on God's schedule.
Bryan Stevenson
#10. His freedom was, in a small way, a sign of hope in a hopeless place.
Bryan Stevenson
#11. 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
#13. 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.
Bryan Stevenson
#14. These aren't my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor.
Bryan Stevenson
#15. Embracing our brokenness creates a need and a desire for mercy and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.
Bryan Stevenson
#16. All of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone,
Bryan Stevenson
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing
Bryan Stevenson
#22. If you love your community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances.
Bryan Stevenson
#23. 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
#24. The death penalty can be imposed fairly only after carefully considering all the reasons why death might not be the appropriate sentence
Bryan Stevenson
#25. Florida is one of a few states that allows the prosecutor to decide to charge a child in adult court for certain crimes and has no minimum age for trying a child as an adult.
Bryan Stevenson
#27. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not *just* a liar. If you take something that does not belong to you, you're not *just* a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not *just* a killer.
Bryan Stevenson
#28. 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
#29. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.
Bryan Stevenson
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.
Bryan Stevenson
#34. We need more hope. We need more mercy. We need more justice.
Bryan Stevenson
#35. 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.
Bryan Stevenson
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I didn't deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that's how mercy works. The
Bryan Stevenson
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Bryan Stevenson
#42. The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.
Bryan Stevenson
#43. I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.
Bryan Stevenson
#44. We've given up on rehabilitation, education, and services for the imprisoned because providing assistance to the incarcerated is apparently too kind and compassionate. We
Bryan Stevenson
#45. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.
Bryan Stevenson
#46. The culture of sexual violence was so pervasive that even the prison chaplain was sexually assaulting women when they came to the chapel.
Bryan Stevenson
#47. Some folks in the office said I should explain in my complaint that I was a civil rights attorney working on police misconduct cases. It seemed to me that no one should need those kinds of credentials to complain about misconduct by police officers.
Bryan Stevenson
#48. 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.
Bryan Stevenson
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.
Bryan Stevenson
#56. I was really struck at how hard he was working to make everyone around him feel better in the face of his own death,
Bryan Stevenson
#57. If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.
Bryan Stevenson
#58. You don't change the world with the ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.
Bryan Stevenson
#59. The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?
Bryan Stevenson
#60. Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different.
Bryan Stevenson
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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.
Bryan Stevenson
#65. 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
#67. America's prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.
Bryan Stevenson
#68. whether the condemned are disabled. We're supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need - all so we can kill them with less resistance.
Bryan Stevenson
#69. In fact, 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.
Bryan Stevenson
#71. 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
#72. Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling - nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At
Bryan Stevenson
#73. 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
#74. It was a common tactic used by Southern politicians during civil rights protests: Sue national media outlets for defamation if they provide sympathetic coverage of activists or if they characterize Southern politicians and law enforcement officers unfavorably.
Bryan Stevenson
#75. The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.
Bryan Stevenson
#77. 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.
Bryan Stevenson
#78. 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
#79. Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
Bryan Stevenson
#82. The opposite of poverty isn't wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.
Bryan Stevenson
#83. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white.
Bryan Stevenson
#84. You can't understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,
Bryan Stevenson
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. We
Bryan Stevenson
#88. Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.
Bryan Stevenson
#90. The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price.
Bryan Stevenson
#91. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation.
Bryan Stevenson
#92. Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.
Bryan Stevenson
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person's humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own.
Bryan Stevenson
#97. 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
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