Quotes from Bryan Stevenson

I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger.

There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.

I know this might be broadcast broadly. But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol.

I think when you see that the status quo creates pain and anguish and suffering, what I am most afraid of is that things will stay the same.

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.

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.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

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.

Obviously, there were ways to have made a lot more money and to have had more leisure. But I wouldn't choose that. I feel rich in ways that are unique and that I would never trade for tens of millions of dollars in the bank.

I'm not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth - I've come to believe... that the opposite of poverty is justice.

If you read the 13th Amendment, it doesn't talk about narratives of racial difference. It doesn't talk about ideologies of white supremacy. It only talks about involuntary servitude and forced labor.

It is unevolved to want to celebrate the architects and defenders of slavery.

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.

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

We all have a responsibility to create a just society

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.

I can't identify a race of people in this country who are more committed to the health of this country, who believe more in the Constitution, who believe more in equality and liberation and fairness to everyone else than black people.

I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.

When I went to Harvard Law School, my first year, I didn't want people to know I started my education in a colored school. I didn't want them to know I was the great-grandson of enslaved people. I thought it might diminish me.

That's my mission: I really want to get in the heads and hearts of kids and persuade them that they can believe things they haven't seen, they can do things that maybe others haven't done before them, that they are more than their worst acts.

I believe that each person is more than the worst thing they've ever done.

My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.

I grew up in a segregated community: I couldn't go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town.

If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.