Marquis de Sade Quotes

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.

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.

The killing of a criminal can be moral, but never its legitimation.

If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death.

If a thief commits a theft by night, if the owner kills the thief, the thief shall be killed lawfully

Suicide's a criminal offense — In less enlightened times they'd have hung you for it.

As a society are we going to murder people to show that murder is wrong

I prefer a prison full of criminals than a graveyard full of innocent people.

Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed?

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

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

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

Some heinous crimes justify the ultimate punishment.

A criminal is undoubtedly a poor soul, who is punished for his poverty.

To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.

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.

I am not a criminal, for I destroyed a bad man. I thought I was right.

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.

Men are sometimes hanged for telling the truth.

Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.

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.

I cannot imagine any crime worse than taking a life, can you? -It'd depend whose life.

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 do not see how hanging litter louts up by their heels and beating them with sticks could be considered a crime.