Bryan Stevenson

Most parents have long understood that kids don't have the judgment, the maturity, the impulse control and insight necessary to make complicated lifelong decisions.

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

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.

It saddens me that African Americans - when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination - African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.

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.

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.

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

Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.

I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough. She was strong. She was powerful.

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