Latest Bryan Stevenson Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• My parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Taught Us, Hopeful, Parent

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I say this thing about how I've never had to say my head is bloodied but not bowed, like everybody who came before me had to say. And that tells me that I can do a lot more than I think I can.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Thinking, Can Do, I Can

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Knowing, People, Capacity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I talk about my grandmother a lot, because she's an amazing person - not in some dramatic, distinct, unique way, but anybody who is the daughter of enslaved people and who has found a way to be hopeful and create love and value justice and seek peace is a remarkable person.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Daughter, Grandmother, Unique

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I do talk and think a lot about the legacy before me. I feel like if I didn't know that people had been in Montgomery sixty years ago trying to do similar things that I'm trying to do, with a lot less, with fewer resources, with less security, with less encouragement, with less opportunity - if I didn't know that, then I think doing what I do would be much, much harder.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Encouragement, Opportunity, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Intuitively we all like to seek the things that are comfortable rather than uncomfortable. But I do think there is a way of saying that if I believe in justice and I believe that justice is a constant struggle, and if I want to create justice, then I have to get comfortable with struggle.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Believe, Struggle, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Resistance, Sometimes, Comfortable

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You can't demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth - people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.

  Bryan Stevenson

  People, Demand, Want

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There were people in the South who were ardently opposed to slavery. And maybe, if we get into truth and reconciliation, those will be the people we want to name schools and streets after.

  Bryan Stevenson

  School, Names, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Legacy, Needs, Slavery

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Lynching, America, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison - that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Baby, Color, Jail

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Montgomery's unique role in the domestic slave trade was that it was the first community that had a rail line that connected the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic region.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Unique, Community, Roles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that's how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Virginia, Feet, Space

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In a landscape littered with all of this imagery about the nobility of the Civil War and the Confederate effort and struggle, the absence of markers says something really powerful.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Powerful, War, Struggle

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Thinking, Museums, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The landscape in Montgomery and in the South is just saturated with imagery. Markers are everywhere. There's a marker for the first Confederate post office, there's a marker for a ball that Robert E. Lee hosted, there's a marker for where Jefferson Davis had a meeting. We love reminding people about all that was going on in the mid-nineteenth century.

  Bryan Stevenson

  People, Office, Balls

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Lynching, People, Slavery

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Country, Pride, Want

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Living in Montgomery, I've been antagonized by the emergence of a narrative about our history that I believe is quite false and misleading, and actually dangerous. And the narrative that emerges when you spend time in the South - places likes Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana - is that we have always been a noble, wonderful, glorious region of the country, with wonderful, noble, glorious people doing wonderful, noble, glorious things. And there's great pride in the Alabamians of the nineteenth century.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Country, Believe, Pride

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When you come to Montgomery, you see fifty-nine monuments and memorials, all about the Civil War, all about Confederate leaders and generals. We have lionized these people, and we have romanticized their courage and their commitment and their tenacity, and we have completely eliminated the reality that created the Civil War.

  Bryan Stevenson

  War, Commitment, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Race, Lenses, Poverty

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Because my great-grandparents were enslaved people, the legacy of slavery was something that didn't seem impersonal or disconnected. That's what motivated me to get into law.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Law, People, Grandparent

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Sometimes the facts of the crime are so distracting - there's been some tragic murder or horrific incident, and people aren't required to think as carefully and thoughtfully, and directly, about this legacy of racial inequality and structural poverty. And what it's contributing to these wrongful convictions.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Thinking, People, Legacy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Bryan Stevenson

  Love You, Justice, Community

  Source: www.progressive.org