Top 80 Anthony Ray Hinton Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “There’s no way to know the exact second your life changes forever.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

52. “What I didn’t understand was how any killing could be justified.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

53. “Maybe this is the plan. Maybe I was born to live most of my life in a five-by-seven so I could travel the world. I would have never won Wimbledon if I hadn’t gone to death row.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

54. “Remember none of us are the worst thing we have done, and right now, wherever you are, whoever you are, you can reach out to your fellow man or woman and bring your own light to the dark places.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

55. “It was a gift to spend time in your mind away from your own reality.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

56. “I’m sorry you lost your mom, but man, you got to look at this a different way. Now you have someone in heaven who is going to argue your case before god. It was silent for a few moments and then the most amazing thing happened, on a dark night in what must surely be the most desolate and dehumanizing place on earth, a man laughed.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

57. “Dear God, let them know the truth of things. Let them see into my mind and my heart and find the truth. Bless the judge. Bless the DA. Bless the victims’ families who are in pain. Dear God, let there be justice. Real justice.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

58. “Loss and grief and a cold madness that defied words floated in the grime and filth that we were all coated in. Hell was real, and it had an address and a name. Death Row, Holman Prison. Where love and hope went to die.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

59. “I’ve been praying to God for the DA, for this judge, and especially for the victims. You got to give an account for what you done, and it don’t matter to me, because if I can recall, Jesus was prosecuted, accused falsely for things he didn’t do, and all he did was try to love and save this world, and he died and suffered. If I have to die for something I didn’t do, so be it. My life is not in this judge’s hands. My life is not in your hands, but it’s in God’s hands.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

60. “Life is brutal, tragic, unbearable, and inhumane at times. The pain one man can cause another is limitless, but I didn’t see – I couldn’t see – how creating more pain made anything better. When you took a life, it didn’t bring back a life. It didn’t undo what was done. It wasn’t logical. We were just creating an endless chain of death and killing, every link connected to the next.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

61. “How many sunrises and sunsets could one man miss in his life and still have a life?”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

62. “I wondered why it is that the cries of another human being – whether it’s a baby or a woman in grief or a man in pain – can touch us in ways we don’t expect.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

63. “I taught you to believe in yourself even if no one else in the world believes in you. Do you believe in you? Do you?”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

64. “Oh, the sanitized way of saying it is “sentenced to death.” But let’s call it what it is. They wanted to murder me because I had murdered.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

65. “I wondered about a world that would just as soon execute a guy as treat him in a hospital or admit he wasn’t mentally capable of knowing right from wrong.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

66. “They can beat you, but they can’t break you.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

67. “It makes you crazy to never sleep. It makes you go to a place where there is no light, and no hope, and no dreams, and no chance for redemption. It makes you think of shadows and demons and death and revenge and of killing before you can be killed.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

68. “There’s some things a body shouldn’t have to get used to,” I said.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

69. “I create an alibi for every single day of my life.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

70. “The row was haunted by remorse and regret and the deaths of all who had died at the hands of the guilty, and of all those who had not died at the hands of the innocent but wanted justice and for their killers to be found.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

71. “I had just turned twenty-nine, and honestly, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sometimes it felt like life was more a process of elimination than a series of choices.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

72. “It seems like the more you know of their story, the more you kind of forgive them for what they do.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

73. “There are no words for how every death kills a little piece of you off. Your soul dies a little, your mind cracks a bit, your heart pounds and bleeds as a piece of it tears off. A mind, and a heart, and a soul could only take so much.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

74. “We all knew grief. We all knew sorrow. We all knew what it was like to be alone. And we were beginning to learn that you can make a family out of anyone.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

75. “When you are trying to survive, the superficial things don’t matter anymore. When you are hanging at the end of your rope, does it really matter what color the hand is that reaches up to help you?”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

76. “I was about to graduate, and what I’d learned most in four years besides biology and arithmetic was just how much people can hate you because of the color of your skin.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

77. “For fourteen years, he could not obtain the legal help he needed to prove his innocence.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

78. “Life was a crazy, strange mix of tragedy and sorrow and triumph and joy.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

79. “I was afraid every single day on death row. And I also found a way to find joy every single day.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

80. “I didn’t know the answers, and I told the guys that. There was no right or wrong in book club.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

81. “Things were supposed to change. Life was not supposed to be exactly the same every day – breakfast at 3:00, lunch at 10:00, dinner at 2:00. You weren’t supposed to spend every single day in a small box doing exactly the same thing as you did the day before and that you would do tomorrow.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

82. “I try not to ask, “Why me?” That’s a selfish question. Why anyone?”

— Anthony Ray Hinton

83. “And spending your days waiting to die is no way to live.”

— Anthony Ray Hinton