No Capital Punishment Quotes

#1. The national laws of the five regions of India prescribe no cangue, beatings or prison. Those who are guilty are fined in accordance with the degree of the offence committed. There is no capital punishment.

Hyecho

#2. 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

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

Howard Zinn

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

Jerry Brown

#8. 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

#9. Besides the pain in my gut, why shouldn't I laugh? I've almost escaped death in a foreign country.

S.A. Tawks

#10. 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.

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Kate Millett

#15. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

#17. 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

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

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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

Banksy

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I've no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment.

Agatha Christie

#25. History of the Jews (Johnson, Paul) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 758-759 | Added on Thursday, March 5, 2015 9:59:47 PM in the Mosaic law no property offence is capital. Human life is too sacred where the rights of property alone are violated. It also repudiates vicarious punishment:

Anonymous

#26. But now inquiry is being made concerning these issues. First, can any believer enlist in the military? Second, can any soldier, even those of the rank and file or lesser grades who neither engage in pagan sacrifices nor capital punishment, be admitted into the church? No on both counts.

Tertullian

#27. As long as you have capital punishment there is no guarantee that innocent people won't be put to death.

Paul Simon

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Mort Sahl

#31. 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

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

Cesare Beccaria

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

William J. Brennan

#36. 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.

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Tony Campolo

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

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

Alfred De Vigny

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

Auberon Waugh

#47. 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

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

Orrin Hatch

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

Bill Maher

#50. 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

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

Werner Herzog

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

Jerzy Kosinski