Desmond Tutu Quotes

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

The death penalty is inhumane... whether that person is in a [jail] or it's bin Laden.

We should execute 27, or 30 or 35 people at one time.

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.

Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

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.

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.

The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.

The death penalty is barbaric. And I think we as a society need to come face-to-face with that. If we're not willing to face up to the cruelty, we ought not to be doing it.

We're also the only country that has the Death Penalty. That's something to boast about, isn't it?

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

I will make Mississippi the capital of capital punishment.

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.

At some point in this death-penalty debate, the sanctity of innocent life demands that men and women of conservative conscience have to say: Enough.

The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process. Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.

I feel capitol punishment is dooming U.S.A.

It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.

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

The death penalty experiment has failed.

If one of our fellow citizens can be executed with so much doubt surrounding his guilt, then the death penalty system in our country is unjust and outdated.

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

As a Christian, as an individual, as a doctor, I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

It's just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can't leave behind something as primitive as government-sponsored execution.

I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.