Daily Inspiration Quote by John Paul Stevens

Stevens is doing something deceptively radical here: lowering the emotional thermostat of proof in a system that habitually demands certainty from people whose lives are defined by uncertainty. By insisting that a "well-founded fear of persecution" does not require showing it is "more likely than not", he redraws the border between suspicion and safety. The line is surgical legal prose, but the moral logic underneath is plain: waiting for probability to ripen into near-certainty means waiting until the threat is mature enough to kill you.

The intent is doctrinal, not sentimental. Stevens is clarifying that asylum is not the same instrument as withholding of removal, a higher standard that effectively turns refuge into a wager on statistical odds. His phrasing rejects the courtroom reflex to treat future harm like a civil damages forecast. Persecution is not an actuarial table; it is often targeted, opaque, and opportunistic. Demanding a 51% likelihood misreads how political violence works and how evidence disappears when a government (or militia) is the persecutor.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to bureaucratic skepticism. "An alien" is the cold statutory term; Stevens keeps it, then counters its dehumanizing distance by making room for reasonable fear as a legitimate form of knowledge. Context matters: late-20th-century U.S. asylum law was a tug-of-war between humanitarian commitments and restrictionist politics. Stevens plants the Court on the side of prevention, not post-mortem proof, and makes the legal system admit what common sense already knows: people flee because they can see the storm before it hits.