John Grisham Quotes

I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal. Sometimes I can tackle an issue-homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty-and wrap a good story around it.

When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

When you make movies, you have to be preoccupied with the social problems, otherwise there is no point in making a movie. To have a story, you need a social problem. Not necessarily a problem, but something to get the idea for a story, otherwise there's no story.

To show that a comedian on stage in India talking about sanitation or in South Africa talking about HIV and AIDS awareness, if you follow the joke into their lives, you can see that, like, oh, these things aren't just contrived in joke books. This is real life. I think the best comedians have that bravery and courage to say, Oh, this is what it is.

I think sometimes in life we want to ignore the problems of society and just think about the good. I believe in positive thinking and affirmative living, I also think it's really important to remember all of our disenfranchised members of society.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I try to support stories that enable us to see the difficulties in our society and the challenges we face, which is why I've also produced documentaries like 'Brick City' and 'Serving Life.'

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

I want to look at the community I came from and what role incarceration has played there.

YA does a fantastic job of being socially aware and, at the same time, entertaining.

The death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment... It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society.

I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery.

I lived in a kind of a middle class home, and I didn't really have a lot of experience with the justice system or prisons or really being aware of that world.

If it doesn't reach the last poor man, your constitution is wrong.

Filmmaking is not a job but a social responsibility for me.

The Government should be taking notice of the youth of today so much more. They're trying to keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor. If I sat down with David Cameron in a room, I would ask him how he feels about it and what the hell he's doing about it.

Mark Udall wants to run a social issues campaign. He definitely wants to run as the social issues candidate.

I feel like it's actually everybody's responsibility to use whatever platform they have to do good in the world, basically, and to try to make our society better, whether you're an accountant or an activist or an athlete or whatever it is. I think it's everybody's responsibility.

I have been talking about social issues on YouTube for a long time now. I think it's very important in terms of being able to reach people around the world and people who have never been exposed to certain topics or are maybe misinformed about certain things.

We've been doing work outside of the anthem since the beginning. Before the anthem even started, players were involved in these types of social justice issues. The anthem protests or demonstrations just brought eyes and attention to it.

You're starting to see more and more athletes recognizing their reach and how much leverage and power that they have in their celebrity and in their platform. And more and more guys are trying to use that leverage to better their communities, to better this country and are speaking out on injustice.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.