Wise, Compassionate, and Powerful Quotes
By Bryan Stevenson
You don’t change the world with the
ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.
There is a strength, a power even, in
understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and
desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you
experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see
things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You
begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.
The true measure of our character is how
we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the
condemned.
The death penalty
symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are
not valid.
Why do we want to kill
all the broken people?
In many ways, we’ve been taught to think
that the real question is, ‘Do people deserve to die for the crimes they’ve
committed?’ And that’s a very sensible question. But there’s another way of
thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it
is not ‘Do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit?’ but ‘Do we
deserve to kill?’
We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much
better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.
I don't think there's been a time in
American history with more innocent people in prison.
Many states can no longer afford to
support public education, public benefits, public services without doing
something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.
The opposite of poverty isn't wealth.
The opposite of poverty is justice.
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.
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.
It's that mind-heart connection that I
believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzling
things but also the dark and difficult things.
I've come to understand and to believe
that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I believe that
for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not
just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them,
they're not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a
killer. And because of that, there's this basic human dignity that must be
respected by law.
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.
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. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and
abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and
we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass
incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's
necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice,
and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.
Always do the right thing even when the
right thing is the hard thing.
Somebody has to stand when other people
are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
All of our survival is tied to the
survival of everyone.
Mercy is most
empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the
undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are
the most meaningful recipients of our compassion.
Sometimes we’re
fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would
never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common
humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing.
Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity
for compassion.
We
all have a responsibility to create a just society.
― Bryan
Stevenson
From Just Mercy: A Story of
Justice and Redemption
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