Chris Gillis > Chris's Quotes

“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“I skipped two short steps and walloped the back of his head with an energy-charged swing of the pipe. The street collided with his jaw.”
― Billy O'Connor, Confessions of a Bronx Bookie

“The longer the wars, the younger the men who must finish them.”
― Billy O'Connor, Confessions of a Bronx Bookie

“In Nam, the jungle's heat was heavy, and like a spoiled overweight child, it insisted on being carried everywhere.”
― Billy O'Connor, Confessions of a Bronx Bookie

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. ”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Is it hard?'
Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice...The real question of capital punishment in this country is, not do they deserve to die, but do we deserve to kill?”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed for every three hundred Americans; fifty years later, it was one bed for every three thousand.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“American prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been largely ruled by misguided drug policy and excessive sentencing, but the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Finally, we spend lots of money. Spending on jails and prisons by state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today. Private prison builders and prison service companies have spent millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can earn more profits. Private profit has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption