Stanislaw Jerzy Lec Quotes

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.

You will be excellently executed.

The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

Some heinous crimes justify the ultimate punishment.

It's like being on Death Row in an American jail. You are waiting for the door handle to turn, not knowing whether it's a reprieve or just your final breakfast before 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.

I hear they burn for murder. Well, they say it just takes a second to die.

When the lever is pulled, the body twists and shudders violently, cooks and sizzles obscenely, and emits horrible noises from the nose, mouth and anus…Chapman said it was the ghastliest mode of death he could have conjured, short of slow torture, and that no sane person who witnessed it could possibly oppose its replacement by a less violent means of execution.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don't have executions.

I am a child of America. If ever I'm sent to Death Row for my revolutionary 'crimes,' I'll order as my last meal: a hamburger, french fries, and a coke.

The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

Capital punishment, that thing scares me, it really does. I was talking to my friend about the electric chair, and he starts freakin' out. He's like 'the electric chair? That's too good for these people. That's too good for them'. Alright, how do we make the electric chair worse? How about this? They have to pedal a car battery to their own head. Is that ok? Is that enough, Mr. Hitler?

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

I want to accelerate, not slow down, the enforcement of the death penalty in Florida.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

Life is indeed precious, and I believe the death penalty helps affirm this fact.

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.

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

If an offender has committed murder, he must die. In this case, no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death.

I favor capital punishment. It saves lives.

Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.

There's a group in California that wants to make suicide a capital offense punishable by death. That's like punishing someone for being on a hunger strike by sending them to bed with no supper.

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.