Top 250 Bryan Stevenson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “It’s been so strange, Bryan. 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.” He looked at me, and his face twisted in confusion.”

— Bryan Stevenson

202. “Such a judgement cannot rationally be passed on children below a certain age because they are unfinished products, human works in progress.”

— Bryan Stevenson

203. “I couldn’t help but ask myself, Where were these people when he really needed them? Where were all of these helpful people when Herbert was three and his mother died? Where were they when he was seven and trying to recover from physical abuse? Where were they when he was a young teen struggling with drugs and alcohol? Where were they when he returned from Vietnam traumatized and disabled?”

— Bryan Stevenson

204. “Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation and deal with the stress of a potential execution; it’s also key to effective advocacy.”

— Bryan Stevenson

205. “Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.”

— Bryan Stevenson

206. “It seems to me that we’ve been quick to celebrate the achievements of the civil rights movement and slow to recognize the lasting damage of marginalization and subordination done...”

— Bryan Stevenson

207. “When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise.”

— Bryan Stevenson

208. “As he walked to the car, Walter raised his arms and gently moved them up and down as if he meant to take flight. He looked at me and said, “I feel like a bird, I feel like a bird.”

— Bryan Stevenson

209. “Our system traumatizes and victimizes people when we exercise our power to convict and condemn irresponsibly – not just the accused but also their families, their communities, and even the victims of crime.”

— Bryan Stevenson

210. “Presumptions of guilt, poverty, racial bias, and a host of other social, structural, and political dynamics have created a system that is defined by error, a system in which thousands of innocent people now suffer in prison.”

— Bryan Stevenson

211. “It was deeply affirming to meet someone whose work so powerfully animated his life.”

— Bryan Stevenson

212. “It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes.”

— Bryan Stevenson

213. “An older African American man once said to me, “You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.”

— Bryan Stevenson

214. “I was trying so hard to get the project off the ground that my work had quickly become my life. I found something refreshing in the moments I spent with clients when we didn’t relate to one another as attorney and client but as friends.”

— Bryan Stevenson

215. “Well, you know you can’t help everybody,” he looked at me earnestly. “You’ll kill yourself if you try to do that.” He continued looking at me with concern. I smiled. “I know.”

— Bryan Stevenson

216. “Herbert sighed and looked away. “It’s been so strange, Bryan. 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

217. “I often had this feeling when I worked on Walter’s case, that if the anguish of all the stressed lives, the pain of all of the oppressed people in all of the menaced spaces of Monroe County could be gathered in some carefully constructed receptacle, it could power something extraordinary, operate as some astonishing alternative fuel capable of igniting previously impossible action. And who knew what might come of it – righteous disruption or transformational redemption? Maybe both.”

— Bryan Stevenson

218. “I told the Court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes life imprisonment without parole sentences on children.”

— Bryan Stevenson

219. “I decided to talk to youth groups, churches, and community organizations about the challenges posed by the presumption of guilt assigned to the poor and people of color. I spoke at local meetings and tried to sensitize people to the need to insist on accountability from law enforcement.”

— Bryan Stevenson

220. “Private profit has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated.”

— Bryan Stevenson

221. “I love you, too.” There was such tenderness and earnestness in his voice, and just like that, I thought I would start crying. – I was in my office, talking to Jimmy Dill on the night of his execution, and I realized I was thinking about something that had happened nearly forty years earlier.”

— Bryan Stevenson

222. “In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys routinely have multiple encounters with the police. Even though many of these children have done nothing wrong, they are targeted by police, presumed guilty, and suspected by law enforcement of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity.”

— Bryan Stevenson

223. “I had a notion that if we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.”

— Bryan Stevenson

224. “Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible. But it also creates genuine connections with clients. And that’s certainly what happened with Walter.”

— Bryan Stevenson

225. “After a moment, I realized that the time to open the Alabama office had come.”

— Bryan Stevenson

226. “The last thing I was interested in was a fictional story about justice.”

— Bryan Stevenson

227. “He was trying to acculturate himself to a world that corrupted healthy human development in every way.”

— Bryan Stevenson

228. “When I first went to death row in December 1983, America was in the early stages of a radical transformation that would turn us into an unprecedentedly harsh and punitive nation and result in mass imprisonment that has no historical parallel.”

— Bryan Stevenson

229. “In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.”

— Bryan Stevenson

230. “Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state – or any other country in the world.”

— Bryan Stevenson

231. “I was around all these murderers, and yet it felt like sometimes they were the only ones trying to help me.”

— Bryan Stevenson

232. “The drugs became scarce, which prompted state correctional authorities to obtain them illegally, without complying with FDA rules that regulate the interstate sale and transfer of drugs. Drug raids of state correctional facilities were a bizarre consequence of this surreal drug dealing to carry out executions.”

— Bryan Stevenson

233. “Gadsden, Alabama, where jail officials claimed that a thirty-nine-year-old black man had died of natural causes after being arrested for traffic violations. His family maintained that he was beaten by police and jail officials who then denied him his asthma inhaler and medication despite his begging for it.”

— Bryan Stevenson

234. “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

235. “The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world.”

— Bryan Stevenson

236. “I’ve gotten close to victims of violent crime and their families and witnessed how even many of the custodians of mass imprisonment – prison staff – have been made less healthy, more violent and angry, and less just and merciful.”

— Bryan Stevenson

237. “Mr. Dill’s severe disabilities had made me privately hopeful that maybe a judge would be concerned and at least let us present additional evidence. But every court told us, “Too late.”

— Bryan Stevenson

238. “Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. 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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

239. “Many states were using drugs that had been banned for animal euthanasia because they caused a painful and torturous death. The drugs weren’t readily available in the United States, and so states had started importing them from European manufacturers. When the news spread that the drugs were being used in executions in the United States, European producers stopped making them available.”

— Bryan Stevenson

240. “They were acts of terror more than anything else, inspiring fear that any encounter with a white person, any interracial social misstep, any unintended slight, any ill-advised look or comment could trigger a gruesome and lethal response.”

— Bryan Stevenson

241. “For over a century, law enforcement officials in many Southern communities absolutely saw it as part of their duty to investigate and punish black men who had been intimate with white women.”

— Bryan Stevenson

242. “One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison;.”

— Bryan Stevenson

243. “Slavery by Another Name.”

— Bryan Stevenson

244. “We have shot, hanged, gassed, electrocuted, and lethally injected hundreds of people to carry out legally sanctioned executions.”

— Bryan Stevenson

245. “My relatives worked hard all the time but never seemed to prosper. My grandfather was murdered when I was a teenager, but it didn’t seem to matter much to the world outside our family.”

— Bryan Stevenson

246. “Adding insult to injury, Tate went on to be re-elected sheriff, and he remains in office today; he has been sheriff continuously for more than twenty-five years.”

— Bryan Stevenson

247. “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. All of the youngest condemned children – thirteen or fourteen years of age – were black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.”

— Bryan Stevenson

248. “Together, we hoped.”

— Bryan Stevenson

249. “Mercy is like a mirror. I think mercy is what you give to others with the hope that it will come back to you. It’s what you give to people who don’t deserve it. It’s what you give to people who haven’t asked for it.”

— Bryan Stevenson

250. “She continued talking enthusiastically about the story until I promised to visit the museum as soon as I could. I refrained from explaining that I was too busy working on the case of an innocent black man the community was trying to execute after a racially biased prosecution.”

— Bryan Stevenson