Top 250 Bryan Stevenson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

51. “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

52. “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

53. “Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are supposed to die on God’s schedule.”

— Bryan Stevenson

54. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

55. “Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling – nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them.”

— Bryan Stevenson

56. “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

57. “I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness. Embracing our brokenness creates a desire for mercy, and perhaps a need to show mercy to others, too. When you experience mercy, you begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”

— Bryan Stevenson

58. “Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving.”

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

60. “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

61. “These aren’t my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor.”

— Bryan Stevenson

62. “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

63. “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 victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering.”

— Bryan Stevenson

64. “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

65. “His freedom was, in a small way, a sign of hope in a hopeless place.”

— Bryan Stevenson

66. “It seems to me that we’ve been quick to celebrate the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and slow to recognize the damage done in that era. We have been unwilling to commit to a process of truth and reconciliation in which people are allowed to give voice to the difficulties created by racial segregation, racial subordination, and marginalization.”

— Bryan Stevenson

67. “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

68. “The conscience told the tears “I know you really want me to cry But if I release you from bondage, In gaining your freedom you die.” The tears gave it some thought Before giving the conscience an answer “If crying brings you to triumph Then dying’s not such a disaster.”

— Bryan Stevenson

69. “I don’t think there’s been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.”

— Bryan Stevenson

70. “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?”

— Bryan Stevenson

71. “I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.”

— Bryan Stevenson

72. “We need more hope. We need more mercy. And we need more justice.”

— Bryan Stevenson

73. “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

74. “Children are the products of an environment over which they have no real control – passengers through narrow pathways in a world they never made.”

— Bryan Stevenson

75. “America’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.”

— Bryan Stevenson

76. “Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument. – REINHOLD NIEBUHR.”

— Bryan Stevenson

77. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

78. “We are all implicated when we allow others to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, an entire nation. Fear and anger can make us cruel and abusive. We all suffer from the absence of mercy and we harm ourselves as much as we victimize others.”

— Bryan Stevenson

79. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

81. “I was in my late twenties and about to start my fourth year at the SPDC when I met Walter McMillian. His case was one of the flood of cases I’d found myself frantically working on after learning of a growing crisis in Alabama. The state had nearly a hundred people on death row as well as the fastest-growing condemned population in the country, but it also had no public defender system, which meant that large numbers of death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind.”

— Bryan Stevenson

82. “My short time on death row revealed that there was something missing in the way we treat people in our judicial system, that maybe we judge some people unfairly. The more I reflected on the experience, the more I recognized that I had been struggling my whole life with the question of how and why people are judged unfairly.”

— Bryan Stevenson

83. “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

84. “I didn’t deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that’s how mercy works. The.”

— Bryan Stevenson

85. “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

86. “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

87. “You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if your brokenness is not equivalent.”

— Bryan Stevenson

88. “Arresting someone for coming forward with credible evidence that challenged the reliability of a capital murder conviction? The more I thought about it, the more disoriented and provoked I became. It was also sobering. If they arrested people who said things that were inconvenient, how would they react if I challenged them even harder?”

— Bryan Stevenson

89. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

90. “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

91. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

92. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

93. “My work has taught me a vital lesson. Each of us is more than the worse thing we’ve done. I am persuaded that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

— Bryan Stevenson

94. “One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities. By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. While the rate declined in the 1990s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

— Bryan Stevenson

95. “Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different.”

— Bryan Stevenson

96. “Voting Rights Act passed, court clerks and judges still kept the jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed.”

— Bryan Stevenson

97. “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

98. “I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”

— Bryan Stevenson

99. “By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime.”

— Bryan Stevenson

100. “We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our.”

— Bryan Stevenson