George Carlin Quotes

If a man dies when you hang him, keep hanging him until he gets used to it.

Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

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.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.

Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality. As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive.

What you do to these men on California's Death Row, you do to God.

Most people are not affected by [the death penalty]. It's like how many people are actually sent to Iraq and Afghanistan? Such a small percentage.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair, and a five percent chance for escape which are you going to vote for? The electric chair, because youre likely to win?

The sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone . . . I think, myself, that it is an obscenity . . .

I favor capital punishment. It saves lives.

Now in Utah if you get the death sentence, they have the firing squad. In Russia, they call that early retirement.

I have the death sentence in seven genres.

I found that the death penalty  -  and I'm not a hot-button issue person, you know, I'm not a single issue person  -  but what I think drew me to the death penalty is because it raises some very deep, fundamental questions like: Is anybody beyond redemption?

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.

How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?

Chained in a cell, got my own private hell. Preacher crucifies me, warden wants to fry me.

You know, look, if I could strangle these people and not go to hell and get executed, I would, but I can't.

The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.

With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.