Quotes About Executions

#1. This strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston

#2. Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions.

Mark Twain

#3. We're first on executions. We're 49th in funding public education. We're in a race with Mississippi for the bottom, and we're winning.

Kinky Friedman

#4. There are no bad ideas. Only bad executions.

Meinos Kaen

#5. We used to flock to watch gladiators, public torture and executions. In more recent times, our appetite for mortal violence has been sublimated in sports, photorealistic video games, film and literature.

Kenneth Oppel

#6. As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, 'Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?' We knew the answer: No.

Jeanne Woodford

#7. Behind us are two or three dozen country people from the outlying towns. With them are cages of chicken and goats, sheep, even cattle. That's where we fit on market day. Between the executions and the livestock sales.

Kristen Simmons

#8. It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go.

Hyeonseo Lee

#9. What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true ...

Erica Jong

#10. The greatest horrors of our world, from the executions in Iran to the brutalities of the IRA, are committed by people who are totally sincere

John Mortimer

#11. The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1

Timothy Snyder

#12. States kill when they apply the death penalty, when they send their people to war, or when they carry out extra-judicial or summary executions. They can also kill by omission, when they fail to guarantee to their people access to the bare essentials for life.

Pope Francis

#13. I just want Texas to be number one in something other than executions, toll roads and property taxes.

Kinky Friedman

#14. The most horrible thing is not a government that stages public executions, but a government that secretly disposes of its victims.

Lu Xun

#15. ISIS itself regularly fuels hatred of gay people and violence towards them. It broadcasts gruesome executions of homosexuals thrown blindfolded from rooftops.

George Takei

#16. Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all,

Charles Stross

#17. You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.

George Carlin

#18. There has never been any evidence that the death penalty reduces capital crimes or that crimes increased when executions stopped. Tragic mistakes are prevalent ... It is clear that there are overwhelming ethical, financial, and religious reasons to abolish the death penalty.

Jimmy Carter

#19. The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price.

Bryan Stevenson

#20. It's incredibly irresponsible to allow victims' family members to witness executions.

Steve Earle

#21. One man with a gun can control 100 without one ... Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#22. We used to watch executions. I mentioned that in one of my stories. There was a piece of open ground near the area where we lived and we used to play soccer there. That was where they used to hold public executions for soldiers who deserted the army and members of the Kurdish resistance.

Hassan Blasim

#23. The United Nations has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world. But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#24. Miss Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was interested in could have been carried on only by people she liked,and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's self
with internal convulsions,sacrifices,executions.

Henry James

#25. In a city where public executions,duels, fights, magical feuds, and strange events regularly punctuated the daily round, the inhabitants had brought the profession of interested bystander to a peak of perfection. They were, to a man, highly skilled gawpers.

Terry Pratchett

#26. If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#27. Those who have witnessed executions say there is no sound worse than the weeping of mother watching her son being put to death.
They're wrong. There is one sound that is worse.
There is silence.

Carolee Dean

#28. Nearly every major breakthrough innovation has been preceded by a string of failed or misguided executions.

Frans Johansson

#29. Doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?

Martin Amis

#30. Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha

Reif Larsen

#31. The executions of agents, partisans, saboteurs, suspicious people, indulging in espionage and sabotage, and those who were of a detrimental effect to the German Army, were, in my opinion, completely in accordance with the Hague Convention.

Paul Blobel

#32. I've read and traveled a lot in the Middle East, and I built on eyewitness accounts of horrific executions that would shape a boy's character and beliefs if he watched his father die that way. These are the stuff of which nightmares are made.

Terry Hayes

#33. We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots ad executions. We kill every time we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.

Eberhard Arnold

#34. Witches have their share of nasty legends to contend with, I said, thinking of the witch-hunts and the executions that followed.

Deborah Harkness

#35. 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

#36. I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends.

Bret Easton Ellis

#37. USA Today reports that the number of death row executions this year has hit a 35-year low. They attribute that to DNA evidence clearing more people and the fact that Rick Perry has been on the road campaigning.

Jay Leno

#38. When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing.

John Battelle

#39. In the Seventies, a lot of executions via electric chair failed because of technical problems. Seed tells the true story of someone who survived and sought revenge. They buried him alive to make it seem he was dead.

Uwe Boll

#40. [Asserting] important First Amendment rights ... why should [executions] be the one area that is conducted behind closed doors? ... Why shouldn't executions be public?

Phil Donahue

#41. Executions were meant as an exercise in frightfulness according to the theory developed by the Emperor Caligula: "Oderint dum metuant" (Let them hate us as long as they fear us).

Barbara W. Tuchman

#42. I stand morally opposed to killing: war, executions, killing of the old and demented, the killing of children, unborn and born. . . . I believe that all of life is sacred and must be protected, especially in the vulnerable stages at the beginning of life and its end.

Helen Prejean

#43. For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.

Wendy Kaminer

#44. I'm not musically trained and I'm not all these other things. I'm creative with a keyboard and a drum machine, but I can't really make these perfect minimal musical executions - all the things that would be nice with all these refined poems.

Doseone

#45. All this happiness on display is suspect ... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.

Ian McEwan

#46. Gin for executions, beer for birthdays, wine for weddings.

P.J. Wolfson

#47. The goal is justice, not executions. We all want to make sure the process is fair and that the right person is punished. These recommendations are essential to that goal.

William K. Sessions

#48. All in all, the purification of the armed forces, state institutions, and the communist party led to about fifty thousand executions.

Timothy Snyder

#49. Our English monarchs are so unimaginative," said Eldric. "They execute people in such tediously conventional ways.

Franny Billingsley