Victor Hugo Quotes

The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.

Is it right for us, as a society, to do a thing – hang a man – which none of us individually would be prepared to do or even witness? The answer is 'no, not in a civilized society

The issue is not whether there are serious moral and practical costs to employing torture—of course there are for torture is evil. That is precisely why the choice of whether employ it to avert a greater evil is a tragic one.

In recent years, those who claim to have inside knowledge of what the Creator wants us to think and do have been more common on the right than on the right..

What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?

I know something about killing. I don't like killing. And I don't think a state honors life by turning around and sanctioning killing.

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

I believe that inside many Americans lies certain uneasiness about capital punishment.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.

One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.

The penalty of death is the only one that makes an injustice absolutely irreparable; from which it follows that the existence of the death penalty implies that one is exposed to committing an irreparable injustice; from which it follows that it is unjust to establish it. This reasoning appears to us to have the force of a demonstration.

Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.

A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace.

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards.

The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.

The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.

Our emotions may cry for vengeance in the wake of a horrible crime, but we know that killing the criminal will not undo the crime, will not prevent similar crimes by others, does not benefit the victim, destroys human life and brutalizes society. If we are to still violence, we must cherish life. Executions cheapen life.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

It is a great folly to be willing to violate the friendship of God, rather than the law of human friendship.

Innocent people never deserve to die no matter what.