Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

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.

The death penalty is becoming a way of life in this country.

Donald Beardslee is set for execution this week in California. His crimes were about twenty years ago, but it will be the first execution in California in quite some time.

People want to kill people because they don't want them out on the street again.

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.

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.

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.

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

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

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

I want to see if she is serious about the death penalty.

The death penalty question should be put on the agenda in Hungary.

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.

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.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

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.

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.

Some heinous crimes justify the ultimate punishment.

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

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

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.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.