Death Penalty famous quotes

Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons.
-- Alan Parker

#Death Penalty #Reason #Penalties

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
-- Albert Camus

#Punishment #Death Penalty #Murder

I am against the death penalty.
-- Andrew Cuomo

#Death Penalty #Penalties #Against Death Penalty

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.
-- Angela Davis

#America #Slavery #Death Penalty

It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty.
-- Anthony Kennedy

#Weight #Death Penalty #Opinion

I wonder if these death penalty proponents would still hold that it's worth some risk of error if it were their loved one who was murdered by the state, though innocent.
-- Antoinette Bosco

#Errors #Risk #Death Penalty

For where did Dante take the material of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#World #Death Penalty #Hell

The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process... Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.
-- Ban Ki-moon

#Suffering #Execution #Death Penalty

In all religions, we make a choice about what we emphasize, and I choose to come down on the side of a loving God.
-- Bernice King

#Choices #Sides #Death Penalty

The death penalty is being applied in the United States as a fatal lottery.
-- Bianca Jagger

#United States #Death Penalty #Penalties

I don't think there's any question that someday somebody who is innocent will be executed in this country again.
-- Bill McCollum

#Country #Thinking #Death Penalty

The attorney general doesn't favor one method or the other, he favors the death penalty.
-- Bob Butterworth

#Favors #Death Penalty #Penalties

The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.
-- Bryan Stevenson

#Care #Death Penalty #Penalties

Everyone is calm and collected but I am telling you something - I am not calm and I am not collected. It's a sick world out there.
-- Clive Stafford Smith

#Sick #World #Death Penalty

My overriding belief is that it is always possible for criminals to improve and that by its very finality the death penalty contradicts this.
-- Dalai Lama

#Criminals #Belief #Death Penalty

The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.
-- Desmond Tutu

#Mean #Death Penalty #Life Death

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.
-- Desmond Tutu

#Revenge #Justice #Death Penalty

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
-- Desmond Tutu

#Justice #Sides #Death Penalty

I have evolved to where I don't think the death penalty is effective.
-- Evelyn Lundberg Stratton

#Thinking #Death Penalty #Penalties

I'm pro-death penalty, but what I have not seen is anybody that would mock someone on death row.
-- Gary Bauer

#Death Penalty #Penalties #Death Row

Given the irreversibility of the death penalty, the possibility of a wrongful conviction can never be overstated
-- George Gascon

#Death Penalty #Law Enforcement #Possibility

We need to acknowledge that the death penalty is broken beyond repair.
-- George Gascon

#Broken #Needs #Death Penalty

I am haunted by the demon of error - error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.
-- George Ryan

#Errors #Guilt #Death Penalty

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.
-- George Ryan

#Illinois #Arbitrary #Death Penalty

If Moses is our lawgiver [Old Testament prophet given laws by God] at this time let us obey him, not in part only, but wholly, and put every Sabbath breaker, blasphemer, and adulterer to death.
-- Gerald Heaney

#Law #Death Penalty #Old Testament

I was a supporter and believer in the death penalty, but I've begun to see that this system doesn't work and it isn't functional. It costs an obscene amount of money.
-- Gil Garcetti

#Cost #Death Penalty #Penalties

The costs can't be borne by smaller counties particularly, so if the crime occurs in a large county you might be charged with the death penalty, in a smaller county you're not. That raises some significant questions about fairness.
-- Greg Zoeller

#Cost #Might #Death Penalty

Now I am dedicating that life to campaigning against the death penalty and raising awareness about human rights.
-- Hafez Ibrahim

#Rights #Death Penalty #Awareness

The death penalty experiment has failed.
-- Harry A. Blackmun

#Death Penalty #Penalties #Experiments

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. ... I fell morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.
-- Harry A. Blackmun

#Death Penalty #Penalties #Machinery

Do they deserve to die?" but "Do we deserve to kill them?
-- Helen Prejean

#Death Penalty #Deserve

Government ... can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.
-- Helen Prejean

#Government #Citizens #Death Penalty

I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.
-- Jack Kemp

#Thinking #Punishment #Death Penalty

I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.
-- Jack Kevorkian

#Plato #Death Penalty #Philosopher

I had concluded when I was the prosecutor that I would vote against the death penalty if I were in the legislature but that I could ask for it when I was satisfied as to guilt.
-- Janet Reno

#Guilt #Death Penalty #Vote

Conservatives should question how the death penalty actually works in order to stay true to small government, reduction in wasteful spending, and respect for human life.
-- Jay Sekulow

#Government #Order #Death Penalty

From the moment you are in that cell, when they tell you you're going ot be electrocuted, you contemplate it all the time. It never leaves your mind, and they never let it leave your mind.
-- Jay Smith

#Cells #Mind #Death Penalty

The death penalty serves no one. It doesn't serve the victims. It doesn't serve prevention. It's truly all about retribution....There comes a time when you have to ask if a penalty that is so permanent can be available in such an imperfect system. The only guarantee against executing the innocent is to do away with the death penalty.
-- Jeanne Woodford

#Guarantees #Prevention #Death Penalty

Commute me, execute me. Don't drag it out.
-- Jesse Bishop

#Death Penalty #Drag

When you're talking about death, you can't afford to make even one mistake.
-- Jim Petro

#Mistake #Talking #Death Penalty

Capital punihsment: That without the Capital get the punishment.
-- John Spenkelink

#Punishment #Death Penalty

McVeigh's lawyer got him the death penalty, which, quite frankly, I could have done.
-- Jon Stewart

#Done #Death Penalty #Lawyer

We oppose the death penalty not just for what it does to those guilty of heinous crimes, but for what it does to all of us: It offers the tragic illusiion that we can defend life by taking life.
-- Joseph Fiorenza

#Doe #Death Penalty #Guilty

As a Christian, as an individual, as a doctor, I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty.
-- Joycelyn Elders

#Christian #Death Penalty #Individual

For justice to have any meaning, it must also mean that no innocent person should ever be executed...
-- Kathleen Parker

#Mean #Justice #Death Penalty

I don't think there's any words in the English language to explain what it's -what it's like to- to sit on Texas death row and your thoughts are laying on that gurney, convicted but innocent and being put to death.
-- Kerry Max Cook

#Thinking #Texas #Death Penalty

It is an expensive government program with the power to kill people.
-- L. Brent Bozell, Jr.

#Government #People #Death Penalty

If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving.
-- Lawrence Lessig

#Law #Tickets #Death Penalty

Most conservatives also believe in the death penalty, but not abortion, which proves they like to procrastinate.
-- Margaret Cho

#Believe #Abortion #Death Penalty

Evidence of innocence is irrelevant!
-- Mary Sue Terry

#Death Penalty #Innocence #Evidence

I believe that no one should be executed, guilty or innocent. There are appropriate sanctions that protect society and punish wrongdoers without forcing us to stoop to the level of the least among us at his or her worst moment.
-- Mike Farrell

#Believe #Levels #Death Penalty

You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.
-- N. T. Wright

#Abortion #Pro Life #Death Penalty

The death sentence is a barbaric act.
-- Nelson Mandela

#Death Penalty #Sentences #Death Sentence

The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.
-- Nelson Mandela

#Reflection #Animal #Death Penalty

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.
-- Noam Chomsky

#Powerful #Demand #Death Penalty

I think the death penalty's easier than life in prison,
-- Pamela Smart

#Thinking #Death Penalty #Prison

First of all, it does not deter crime, the death penalty.
-- Patricia Cornwell

#Firsts #Doe #Death Penalty

I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote that he would support the death penalty only when the infallibility of human judgment had been demonstrated.
-- Paul Jacob

#Support #Death Penalty #Judgment

I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.
-- Primo Levi

#Men #Death Penalty #Mankind

God in His law requires the death penalty for homosexuals.
-- R.J. Rushdoony

#Law #Religion #Death Penalty

A humane and generous concern for every individual, his health and his fulfillment, will do more to soothe the savage heart than the fear of state-inflicted death, which chiefly serves to remind us how close we remain to the jungle.
-- Ramsey Clark

#Heart #Savages #Death Penalty

The death penalty doesn't need your assent to continue ... it needs your indifference.
-- Ray Krone

#Needs #Death Penalty #Indifference

It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.
-- Remy de Gourmont

#Favors #Death Penalty #Penalties

I support the death penalty and will continue to do that.
-- Rick Santorum

#Support #Death Penalty #Penalties

I think [the death penalty is] very expensive, and the delays are inordinate, delaying closure for the victims' families.
-- Rob McKenna

#Thinking #Delay #Death Penalty

Remember, the death penalty is murder.
-- Robert Drew

#Death Penalty #Remember #Murder

At some point in this death-penalty debate, the sanctity of innocent life demands that men and women of conservative conscience have to say: Enough.
-- Rod Dreher

#Men #Demand #Death Penalty

People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.
-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#People #Trials #Death Penalty

Eliminating the death penalty...will not hinder the prosecutorial capacity to seek, or the court's ability to impose, 'life without parole' sentences for serious, heinous crimes and criminals.
-- Scott Harshbarger

#Serious #Criminals #Death Penalty

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.
-- Scott Turow

#Punishment #Death Penalty #Capital Punishment

I Don't Want To Live Long. I Would Rather Get The Death Penalty Than Spend The Rest Of My Life In Prison
-- Theodore Kaczynski

#Long #Want #Death Penalty

The fanatic has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.
-- Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#Death Penalty #Murder #Intolerance

I believe that the death penalty is the ultimate deterrent to violent crime...period.
-- Troy King

#Believe #Death Penalty #Crime

I stood up to the liberal elite when they came to our state (Alabama) and tried to eliminate the death penalty, we won, they lost.
-- Troy King

#Alabama #Death Penalty #States

What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!
-- Victor Hugo

#Law #Doe #Death Penalty

Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.
-- William J. Brennan

#Facts #Death Penalty #Innocent

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
-- Woody Allen

#Punishment #Would Be #Death Penalty

People who change their religion should face the death penalty.
-- Zakir Naik

#People #Faces #Death Penalty

If a Muslim becomes a non-Muslim and propagates his/her new religion, then it is as good as treason. There is a Death Penalty in Islam for such a person.
-- Zakir Naik

#Islamic #Death Penalty #Penalties

There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.
-- Dinesh D'Souza

#Years #Criminals #Death Penalty

I would say that there are a lot of people who currently disagree with the death penalty, I just hope that it's never one of their family members that is killed, because then they will probably change their mind on capital punishment.
-- John Cabello

#People #Mind #Death Penalty

If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.
-- Sandra Day O'Connor

#May #Statistics #Death Penalty

Remember the death penalty is murder.
-- Robert Drew

#Death Penalty #Remember #Murder

In Texas, we have the death penalty, and we use it. That's right. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.
-- Ron White

#Texas #Use #Death Penalty

It's not about whether you are innocent or guilty. It's about whether or not you can prove you're innocent. If you can't prove you're innocent, then you're considered guilty. It's been flipped: Now it's guilty until proven innocent.
-- Ronald Jones

#Death Penalty #Guilty #Innocent

If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call.
-- John C. McAdams

#Risk #Facts #Death Penalty