quotations about capital punishment
Opponents of capital punishment for murderers argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family, not only on behalf of society.
DENNIS PRAGER
"If You're Ever Murdered, Here's an Idea", The Dennis Prager Show, February 21, 2012
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists
The sentence of the first murderer was pronounced by the Supreme Judge of the universe. Was it death? No, it was life. "A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth;" and "Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold."
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook J", Aphorisms
Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
You know, what I hope the Supreme Court will do is make it absolutely clear that any state that continues capital punishment either must meet the highest standards of evidentiary proof of effective assistance of counsel or they cannot continue it because that, to me, is the real dividing line.
HILLARY CLINTON
The Washington Post, February 5, 2016
Look at the creeps who favor capital punishment; you get the feeling they want to be the ones to pull the switch.
MELVIN BELLI
interview, Playboy, June 1965
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.
GEORGE ORWELL
The Road to Wigan Pier
Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD
Modes and Morals
Repeat offender, burn that a** to a cinder
You molester, striking fear and drawing tears
Scars are deep the innocent you had to cheat
Capital Punishment should be your favorite treat
STUCK MOJO
"Throw the Switch"
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
HENRY FORD
The Modern Review, 1928
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.
ALBERT CAMUS
"Reflections on the Guillotine", Resistance, Rebellion and Death
A criminal who, having renounced reason ... hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tiger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security.
JOHN LOCKE
Second Treatise of Civil Government
The law which attempts a man's life is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime -- for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
MARQUIS DE SADE
Philosophy in the Bedroom
If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.
STEVE ALLEN
Reflections
Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
WOODY ALLEN
Death
It's just really tragic that after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years, we can't leave behind something as primitive as government-sponsored execution.
RUSS FEINGOLD
Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1999
Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Bet