Capital Punishment For Quotes

#1. We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#2. There's only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, it was often the case that the criminal would be killed first and then crucified.

Reza Aslan

#3. We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.

Potter Stewart

#4. The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#5. I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment.

James Madison

#6. We make needless ado about capital punishment,
taking lives, when there is no life to take.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

Albert Camus

#8. What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead men never bring awkward stories to light. The prospect of the gallows, too, makes them hardy and bold. Ah, it's a fine thing for the trade! Five of them strung up in a row, and none left to play booty or turn white-livered!

Charles Dickens

#9. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

George Bernard Shaw

#10. I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

Nancy Reagan

#11. I don't know if the question is whether you believe in capital punishment anymore. I think the greater question is its effectiveness and given the choices we face in California, should we have a merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs?

Tani Cantil-Sakauye

#12. I don't agree with capital punishment as it is now, because too often mistakes are made. But I think that if you eliminate the mistakes, then there are times when it is justified.

Jeff Lindsay

#13. But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder.

Benjamin Tucker

#14. The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder.

Geoffrey Fisher

#15. It is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree ... I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.

Albert Pierrepoint

#16. God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

Victor Hugo

#17. The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.

Bryan Stevenson

#18. Opponents of capital punishment 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 not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.

Dennis Prager

#19. Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

Banksy

#20. Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#21. The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] 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

#22. In case anybody asks you about my position on capital punishment, you can tell them I favor it; and if they want to know why, you can tell them this story.

Ronald Reagan

#23. The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?

Bryan Stevenson

#24. It doesn't make any difference if you are in favor of capital punishment or if you are opposed to capital punishment. The fact of the matter is that as a viable penalty, capital punishment does not work at this time and has not worked in the State of Florida for many, many years.

Gerald Kogan

#25. Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.

Laurence Housman

#26. One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts ... to my surprise ... almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

#27. Just days after the alleged rape, Florida newspapers were calling for capital punishment of the Groveland Boys. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

Gilbert King

#28. Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.

H.L. Mencken

#29. Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Henry Ford

#30. Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed?

Woody Allen

#31. Mr. Lundberg: "I asked you for your position on capital punishment."
Student: "Prone.

Kristin Hannah

#32. Jesus is the most famous victim of capital punishment.

James Martin

#33. The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war ... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

H.L. Mencken

#34. I support capital punishment. But let's be clear: It's a decision for each state to make.

Ted Cruz

#35. The serial murderer often seeks the very form of capital punishment that is being held over his head as a deterrent.

Joel Norris

#36. We don't know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.

Mario Puzo

#37. If the executioner goes, my package will never be made public. If he doesn't go, it will be made public exactly fifty years from the day the bill for a moratorium on capital punishment is defeated.

Caryl Chessman

#38. Supporters of capital punishment bear a special responsibility to ensure the fairness of this irreversible punishment.

William J. Clinton

#39. A civilized society looks with horror upon the abuse and torture of children or adults. Even where capital punishment is practiced, the aim is to implement it as mercifully as possible. Are we to believe then that a holy God-our heavenly Father-is less just than the courts of men?

Sidney Hatch

#40. I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.

Benjamin Tucker

#41. Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Orrin Hatch

#42. I guess having one hundred and four condoms full of heroin in your guts and the thought of a firing squad in your head make will make most things seem insignificant.

S.A. Tawks

#43. The main objection to killing people as a punishment ... is that killing people is wrong

Auberon Waugh

#44. The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

Alfred De Vigny

#45. Capital punishment? It makes no sense as a policy: It's not a deterrent, and economically it's a disaster. It's very clear that there are innocent people on death row. And if I put an innocent person to death, that's murder.

Tony Goldwyn

#46. At the end of the day, perhaps the best argument against capital punishment may be that it is an issue beyond the limited capacity of government to get things right.

Scott Turow

#47. I'm disappointed that my own Catholic Church has decided that capital punishment is wrong. Which is pretty hypocritical if you think about it, because they wouldn't even have a religion if it wasn't for capital punishment.

Stephen Colbert

#48. I contend that it's impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment.

Tony Campolo

#49. I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.

Bill Maher

#50. Judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish: it can only add a second atrocity to the original one.

Auberon Waugh

#51. Does capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means. It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them; and it renders life insecure, inasmuch as the law holds out that property is of greater value than life.

Elizabeth Fry

#52. Capital punishment ... treats members of the human race ... as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

William J. Brennan

#53. Of all parties I now see only one party- The Anarchist- which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether.

Peter Kropotkin

#54. Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they're quick to say, 'Put them to death,' or scream 'capital punishment.'

Jeff Lindsay

#55. The murder that is depicted as a horrible crime is repeated in cold blood, remorselessly.

Cesare Beccaria

#56. 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.

Thurgood Marshall

#57. I'm for capital punishment. You've got to execute people. How else are they going to learn?

Mort Sahl

#58. I am in favour of capital punishment if the execution of the sentence is immediate. The purpose of the death penalty is to send out a message to society.

Ujjwal Nikam

#59. This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.

Kate Millett

#60. But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.

Victor Hugo

#61. Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.

Anna Quindlen

#62. My own view on capital punishment is that it is morally justified, but that the government is often so inept and corrupt that innocent people might die as a result. Thus, I personally oppose capital punishment.

Ed Crane

#63. Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#64. I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.

Aldrich Ames

#65. Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.

Jerry Brown

#66. Countries and states which have capital punishment have a much higher rate of murder and crime than countries that do not, so that makes sense to me, and the moral question - I struggle with it morally.

Charlize Theron

#67. Ninety countries still hold on to capital punishment, and, sadly, one of these is the United States, the only Western industrialized country to practice this barbaric punishment.

Antoinette Bosco

#68. If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

Anton Chekhov

#69. Capital punishment could not be justified in any society calling itself civilized.

Howard Zinn

#70. For years I supported capital punishment, but I have come to believe that our criminal justice system is incapable of adequately distinguishing between the innocent and guilty. It is reprehensible and immoral to gamble with life and death.

James Frey

#71. I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment ... We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.

John Paul Stevens

#72. There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital.

Jerzy Kosinski

#73. I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.

Werner Herzog

#74. Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.

Clint Eastwood