Ralph Nader Quotes

I don't think I would want the responsibility for enforcing the death penalties. There's always the inevitable question of whether someone you gave the order to execute might truly have been innocent.

I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.

I was badly mauled by people in New York State for being against the death penalty for 12 years.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.

The death penalty is discriminatory and does not do anything about crime.

I'm actually really opposed to the death penalty.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

I am against the death penalty.

I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

I don't believe in killing people. I believe in locking you up for the rest of your life.

I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

I'm not in favor of the death penalty. But I'm in favor of locking these people away in maximum security units where they can never get out. They can never escape. They can never be paroled. Lock the bad ones away. But you gotta rethink everybody else.

Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty... mine's putting in an express lane.

I’m not necessarily against the death penalty. But I am damn sure against the wrong man getting executed.

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.

The death penalty experiment has failed …. I will no longer tinker with the machinery of death.

The Court had better be right in its capital punishment cases and perhaps it not always is.

Why does the new crime bill have so many new ways of killing people?

I will make Mississippi the capital of capital punishment.

I don't get any damn pleasure out of the death penalty and I never have .... If they abolished it tomorrow, I'd go out and get drunk in celebration.

The highest and ultimate political power is capital punishment.

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

The death penalty has always been fraught with racial bias…. I cannot understand how people can find pleasure in, or believe that civilized values are served by, the killing of another human being.

Where the death penalty is involved, our criminal justice system essentially reserves the death penalty for murderers (regardless of their race) who kill white victims.

The death penalty does absolutely nothing to deter crime.