Werner Herzog Quotes

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.

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

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

I think a lot of people view the death penalty as a debate class or something. The cost and what's at stake is really, really a big deal.

Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?

I think the use of lethal injection is the way of lying to ourselves, to make it look like executions are peaceful, are benign, are sort of like going to sleep, and they're not. They're brutal things.

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.

Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.

I don't have an issue with whether - from a legal standpoint, with whether or not government can impose the ultimate punishment on people. We do it in capital cases. Police officers shoot fleeing felons.

Is it really more barbaric to be killed by chemicals than by “legitimate” weapons?

There is no justification for execution by the state under modern circumstances … Bishops have testified against it, popes talk about it constantly and it has the same status as abortion in terms of rejection.

Sooner of later, universal human rights will include the right not to be killed by the government.

I am a proponent of capital punishment. I am not a proponent of capital torture.

There is always a political issue whenever you empower a state to kill its own citizens … the abuse of the power as in Europe of the 20th century is the problem …. If we believe that some people ought to receive the death penalty for their crimes, there appears to be no way of executing the ones who should receive the death penalty without sweeping in ones who do not.

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.

By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

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 don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.

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

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

In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? And that's a very sensible question. But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill?

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

Can the state, which represents the whole of society and has the duty of protecting society, fulfill that duty by lowering itself to the level of the murderer, and treating him as he treated others? The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process.

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