Horace Greeley Quotes

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.'

The death penalty issue is obviously a divisive one. But whether one is for or against, you can not deny the basic illogic - if we know the system is flawed, if we know there are innocent people on Death Row, then until the system is reformed, should we not abandon the death penalty to protect those who are innocent?

I will make Mississippi the capital of capital punishment.

I think in some instances that the death penalty is required.

I am pro-death penalty, but not an enthusiastic death-penalty person. I think there's a place for it, that it should serve as a deterrent.

I support the death penalty. But I also think there has to be no margin for error.

I am against the death penalty.

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

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

I am passionately opposed to capital punishment, and I have been all my life.

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

Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty... mine's putting in an express lane.

When a mad man is executed, it is a miserable spectacle, both against law, and of extreme inhumanity and cruelty, and can be no example to others.

If we are trying to establish a culture of life, it’s difficult to have the state sponsoring executions.

Is there not blood enough upon your penal code?

Those who favor capital punishment do so in the name of justice. Can there be any argument against insisting that it be imposed justly—and not on the wrong people.

I don't get any damn pleasure out of the death penalty and I never have .... If they abolished it tomorrow, I'd go out and get drunk in celebration.

Proposals to abolish the death penalty demnstrate an effeminacy in the general mind of the country.

I'm always theoretically opposed to capital punishment as a matter of policy; like, I don't believe a state should put its citizens to death.

If, through death penalty, we can create fears, though it's against my will, we have to do it.

I believe life imprisonment is far worse than the death penalty.

But I'm not pro death penalty. I - I'm just anti the notion that it is not a matter for democratic choice, that it has been taken away from the democratic choice of the people by a provision of the Constitution.

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.

The death penalty is discriminatory and does not do anything about crime.