Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

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 know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad!

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.

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

It's incredibly irresponsible to allow victims' family members to witness executions.

To condemn someone to death is to surrender; it proves that you failed. You are not able to change him, to change her; you have to kill him or her. You surrender. ... You only demonstrate your lack of capacity, your helplessness. This is failure.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

Requiring that an execution be relatively painless...actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

My curiosity to see the melancholy spectacle of the executions was so strong that I could not resist it, although I was sensible that I would suffer much from it.... I got upon a scaffold near the fatal tree so that I could clearly see all the dismal scene.... I was most terribly shocked, and thrown into a very deep melancholy.

I had rather be guillotined than a guillotiner.

Here’s why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.

Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope

Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.

What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?

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?

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.

I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

But huge photographs of dead bodies are slightly different. I couldn't find much humor there.

The cutting of heads is become so much a la mode, that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders.

I don’t see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.

If the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree.

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, 'Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?' We knew the answer: No.

A speech from Ernest Bevin on a major occasion had all the horrific fascination of a public execution. If the mind was left immune, eyes and ears and emotions were riveted.