Top 250 Bryan Stevenson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

— Bryan Stevenson

2. “The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.”

— Bryan Stevenson

3. “Always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing.”

— Bryan Stevenson

4. “You don’t change the world with the ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.”

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

6. “I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.”

— Bryan Stevenson

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Bryan Stevenson

11. “We all have a responsibility to create a just society.”

— Bryan Stevenson

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,” she told me all the time.”

— Bryan Stevenson

16. “The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don’t fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.”

— Bryan Stevenson

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Why do we want to kill all the broken people?”

— Bryan Stevenson

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person’s humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own.”

— Bryan Stevenson

25. “An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation.”

— Bryan Stevenson

26. “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

27. “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?”

— Bryan Stevenson

28. “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 incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

— Bryan Stevenson

29. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

30. “So defendants like Walter McMillian, even in counties that were 40 or 50 percent black, frequently found themselves staring at all-white juries, especially in death penalty cases. Then, in 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that prosecutors could be challenged more directly about using peremptory strikes in a racially discriminatory manner, giving hope to black defendants – and forcing prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude black jurors.”

— Bryan Stevenson

31. “The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving.”

— Bryan Stevenson

32. “I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the respected, and the privileged among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”

— Bryan Stevenson

33. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

34. “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

35. “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

36. “More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.”

— Bryan Stevenson

37. “Are you the sum total of your worst acts?”

— Bryan Stevenson

38. “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

39. “The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent –.”

— Bryan Stevenson

40. “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

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

— Bryan Stevenson

42. “I’m persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.”

— Bryan Stevenson

43. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

44. “I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.”

— Bryan Stevenson

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Some states have no minimum age for prosecuting children as adults; we’ve sent a quarter million kids to adult jails and prisons to serve long prison terms, some under the age of twelve. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole; nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison.”

— Bryan Stevenson

50. “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