Jodi Picoult Quotes

Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.

'Reversible Errors' is about the limits of the law to define who committed ultimate evil, to define what ultimate evil is, to allow the million arbitrary factors to make this a meaningful punishment, and finally to say, 'Are we really accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish? Are those anxieties relieved?' I don't think so.

I do not think that condemning people who murder and killing them necessarily sends out the right message.

I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

What is done cannot be effaced. We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us ...

They want to do the right thing, most people. For that little core that doesn't want to do the right thing and gets away with it routinely, most people want to see them get a good whupping. And I am your girl.

They all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett Even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death would be relief.

...Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty. But I would, oh, yes.

Do they deserve to die?" but "Do we deserve to kill them?

I think it is obscene that we should believe that we are entitled to end somebody's life, no matter what that person has supposedly done or not done.

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

You must pay for your sins. If you have already paid, please ignore this notice.

They do injury to the good who spares the bad.

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.

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

A man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe one thing only - that by his act he will change the course of history.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

What we have done, the result of that comes to us whenever it comes, either today, tomorrow, hundred years later, hundred lives later, whatever, whatever. And so, it's our own karma. That is why that philosophy in every religion: Killing is sin. Killing is sin in every religion.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit.

It's better to choose the culprits than to seek them out.

We need to keep examining evilness. For instance, I'm totally against the fact that Osama bin Laden was shot. I think that he should have been put on trial and exposed as that human being he was. I think he should've been standing mentally naked in front of the rest of us and stand to justice for what he did.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.