Top 250 Bryan Stevenson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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. 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

202. “We emphasized the incongruity of not allowing children to smoke, drink, vote, drive without restrictions, give blood, buy guns, and a range of other behaviors because of their well-recognized lack of maturity and judgment while simultaneously treating some of the most at-risk, neglected, and impaired children exactly the same as full-grown adults in the criminal justice system.”

— Bryan Stevenson

203. “Your Honor, I just want to say this before we adjourn. It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for murder and send him to death row for something he didn’t do and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence. We have serious problems and important work that must be done in this state.”

— Bryan Stevenson

204. “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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

206. “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

207. “Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it.”

— Bryan Stevenson

208. “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

209. “The fourth institution is mass incarceration. Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug.”

— Bryan Stevenson

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “The signs gave a silent voice to the crowd: ‘Welcome Home, Johnny D,’ ‘God Never Fails,’ ‘Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We Are Free at Last.”

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

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

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

— 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. “Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the collateral consequences of voter disenfranchisement, and the barriers to re-entry can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history.”

— Bryan Stevenson

233. “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

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. “Michael smiled and replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Nittany Lion.”

— Bryan Stevenson

236. “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

237. “Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences.”

— Bryan Stevenson

238. “The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled.”

— Bryan Stevenson

239. “Jim Crow,” is the legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined the American apartheid era. It is more recent and is recognized in our national consciousness, but it is still not well understood. 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.”

— Bryan Stevenson

240. “I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human.”

— Bryan Stevenson

241. “In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed for every three hundred Americans;.”

— Bryan Stevenson

242. “Her father talked to her all the time about growing up in slavery and how he learned to read and write but kept it a secret. He hid the things he knew – until Emancipation.”

— Bryan Stevenson

243. “I got in my car, and to my delight the radio came on as soon as I turned the ignition. In just over three years of law practice I had become one of those people for whom such small events could make a big difference in my joy quotient.”

— Bryan Stevenson

244. “There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.”

— Bryan Stevenson

245. “The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people.”

— Bryan Stevenson

246. “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

247. “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

248. “Slavery by Another Name.”

— Bryan Stevenson

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

— Bryan Stevenson

250. “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