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Just Mercy (Adapted for Young Adults): A True Story of the Fight for Justice
Bryan Stevenson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“My work has taught me a vital lesson. Each of us is more than the worse thing we've done. I am persuaded that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
“We are all implicated when we allow others to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, an entire nation. Fear and anger can make us cruel and abusive. We all suffer from the absence of mercy and we harm ourselves as much as we victimize others.”
“You can't effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. 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.”
“I've come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the respected, and the privileged among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
“I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness. Embracing our brokenness creates a desire for mercy, and perhaps a need to show mercy to others, too. When you experience mercy, you begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”
“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,” she told me often.”
“We’ve sent a quarter million kids, some under the age of twelve, to adult jails and prisons. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole.”
“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, an entire nation. Fear and anger can make us cruel and abusive. We all suffer from the absence of mercy and we harm 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.”
“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It's when mercy is least expected that it's most powerful.”
“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. To be clear, these numbers reflect who is being convicted and incarcerated, not who is necessarily committing crimes.”
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Book Keywords:
poverty, justice, mercy