Bryan Stevenson Quotes

We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time--we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.

We're standing on the shoulders of so many people who have already broken down so many barriers.

I know that there are obstacles; I know that there are hills to climb, I know there were people before me that made my journey easier and there are people behind me that I have made the journey easier for.

My mother and grandmothers could never have lived my life; my father and my grandfathers could never have imagined it. But they bestowed on me the promise of America, which made my life and my choices possible.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

We can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

History happens all around us.

Oh yes. And a great many of them still do.

I'm trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep past.

I've learned to appreciate the thinking of John Kennedy.

I'm trying to create a better pathway for the next generation.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

What can we be in life? Few figures in history have answered this question with as much clarity and moral authority as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King didn't know he was going to have a day named after him; Muhammad Ali didn't know he was going to be the people's champion. He was doing what he was doing because it was right.

Tradition matters. To me it's not a limiting force; it's a springboard.

I was born in the 1980s, so learning about the late 1960s was really fascinating, not only just because of the way things looked and sounded but because of what was going on in society at that time.

Anything with the title 'Breaking The Barriers' means a lot to us, and to myself in particular, because if it wasn't for those who broke the barrier of color before me, I would not have the opportunity to live the life I'm leading right now.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

No generation can escape history.

As important as the civil rights movement was, I think what will rise to the top is that we left Earth in that time.

I think we want to be around people that kind of push us and inspire us and maybe teach us.

I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment. . . . He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation.

I felt hopeful for the future because Obama is here. But nothing has changed. It's time for young kids to get serious again and really think about what their four fathers were like. As African-Americans, we are resilient, we are some bad mf-ers, and we are survivors. So get those i-pods out of their ears and become heroes again like the Freedom Riders.

A lot of the time, people want to hear from someone like myself. They want to give it a shot. It's challenging, and it's driven me more than discouraged me.