Quotes by Bryan Stevenson

We've done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality... You see it in the South, but it's everywhere.

I can't identify a race of people in this country who are more committed to the health of this country, who believe more in the Constitution, who believe more in equality and liberation and fairness to everyone else than black people.

I grew up in a segregated community: I couldn't go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town.

It is unevolved to want to celebrate the architects and defenders of slavery.

I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough. She was strong. She was powerful.

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.

If we had done the work that we should have done in the 20th century to combat our history of racial inequality, no one could win national office after demonizing people because they're Mexican or Muslim. We would be in a place where we would find that unacceptable.

I don't think shame is a bad thing. I think it actually moves you and pushes you to think differently about things.

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?

The death penalty in the United States has increasingly come to symbolize a disturbing tolerance for error and injustice that has undermined the integrity of criminal justice administration and America's commitment to human rights.

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.

I think when you see that the status quo creates pain and anguish and suffering, what I am most afraid of is that things will stay the same.

I know this might be broadcast broadly. But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol.

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?

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.

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.

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.

We need more hope. We need more mercy. And we need more justice.

Slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved.

I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.

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.

That's my mission: I really want to get in the heads and hearts of kids and persuade them that they can believe things they haven't seen, they can do things that maybe others haven't done before them, that they are more than their worst acts.

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.

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.

The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

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.

I believe that each person is more than the worst thing they've ever done.

The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

It saddens me that African Americans -- when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination -- African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

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.

We're all burdened by our history of racial inequality. It's created a kind of smog that we all breathe in, and it has prevented us from being healthy.

Why do we want to kill all the broken people?

When I went to Harvard Law School, my first year, I didn't want people to know I started my education in a colored school. I didn't want them to know I was the great-grandson of enslaved people. I thought it might diminish me.

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.

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.

Embracing our brokenness creates a need and a desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

America's prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.

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.

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.

We've all been acculturated into accepting the inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and racial disparities and discrimination against the poor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.

If you love your community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances.

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?

You can't segregate and humiliate people decade after decade without creating long-lasting injuries.

The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.

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.

You can't understand what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, you can't understand what happened to Eric Garner in New York City, without understanding this narrative of racial difference that was created during the slave years.

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.

I'm not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth -- I've come to believe... that the opposite of poverty is justice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude or forced labor. I really believe that the true evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference that we created to justify it.

If you read the 13th Amendment, it doesn't talk about narratives of racial difference. It doesn't talk about ideologies of white supremacy. It only talks about involuntary servitude and forced labor.

Obviously, there were ways to have made a lot more money and to have had more leisure. But I wouldn't choose that. I feel rich in ways that are unique and that I would never trade for tens of millions of dollars in the bank.

One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.

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.

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.

The bad things that happen to us don't define us. It's just important sometimes that people understand where we're coming from.

I heard you in that courtroom today. I've even seen you here a couple times before. I know's you a stonecatcher, too.

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.

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.

There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.

Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.

Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.

Embracing our brokenness creates a need and a desire for mercy and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.