“I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not *just* a liar. If you take something that does not belong to you, you're not *just* a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not *just* a killer.”
Bryan Stevenson“Are you the sum total of your worst acts?”
Bryan Stevenson“Embracing our brokenness creates a need and a desire for mercy and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.”
Bryan Stevenson“Walter's case taught me that 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“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“America's prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption“The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption“I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not *just* a liar. If you take something that does not belong to you, you're not *just* a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not *just* a killer.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption“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, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption“Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter's case taught me that 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. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption