Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Are you the sum total of your worst acts?
Slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved.
I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.
Why do we want to kill all the broken people?
We all have a responsibility to create a just society
Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.
All of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone.
Always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing
I believe that each person is more than the worst thing they've ever done.
I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.
It is unevolved to want to celebrate the architects and defenders of slavery.
I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.
If you love your community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances.
I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.
You don’t change the world with the ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.
If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.
You can't segregate and humiliate people decade after decade without creating long-lasting injuries.
Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
I grew up in a segregated community: I couldn't go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town.
The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.
Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.
I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger.
I'm not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth - I've come to believe... that the opposite of poverty is justice.
The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.
I know this might be broadcast broadly. But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol.
We've done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality... You see it in the South, but it's everywhere.
The opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.
I think when you see that the status quo creates pain and anguish and suffering, what I am most afraid of is that things will stay the same.
If you're just the person with power, exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you're going to be an operative of injustice and inequality.
We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
We're all burdened by our history of racial inequality. It's created a kind of smog that we all breathe in, and it has prevented us from being healthy.
That's what's provocative to me - that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It can be a challenge, but my legacy, at least for the people who came before me, is you don't run from challenges because that's more comfortable and convenient.
The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.
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.
We've all been acculturated into accepting the inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and racial disparities and discrimination against the poor.
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.
You can be a career professional as a judge, a prosecutor, sometimes as a defense attorney, and never insist on fairness and justice. That's tragic and that's what we have to change.
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.
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.
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.