Pope Francis Quotes

I don't believe in the death penalty, but I understand personal vengeance.

I'm actually really opposed to the death penalty.

I am telling you before anything, that the blood of the martyrs and the injured will not go in vain. And I would like to affirm, I will not hesitate to punish those who are responsible fiercely. I will hold those in charge who have violated the rights of our youth with the harshest punishment stipulated in the law.

I believe that capital punishment serves no useful purpose and is a form of revenge.

Executions are not psychological events for the healing of the victims’ families. They are moral events.

There is no such thing as justice—in or out of court.

From this window we see the palace where the King is misled by perfidious counsels. Terror and fear have often issued from yon palace: let them return to-day in the name of the law, and let all those who inhabit that palace know that the King is alone inviolable, that the law will strike down the guilty without respect of persons, and that there is not a guilty head which can escape its sword.

Every punishment is based, not on logic or the feeling of justice, but on the desire to wish evil on those who have done evil to you or to another person…. Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

The net of law is spread so wide, No sinner from its sweep may hide. Its meshes are so fine and strong They take in every child of wrong. O wondrous web of mystery ! Big fish alone escape from thee !

Justice should not admit a public's thirst for pure revenge.

In 'Maatr,' we do not justify taking the law into our hands. That's not the right thing to do. We are not promoting that.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.

We have to address individual acts of corruption. This is a necessary approach. Go after these individuals.

If you take a life, I will take yours. Put me in charge, I will fix it.

But men often mistake killing and revenge for justice. They seldom have the stomach for justice.

Punishment - The justice that the guilty deal out to those that are caught.

It is more important to detect corruption than fiction.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

Just vengeance does not call for punishment.

No public man can be just a little crooked.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?

The crime and not the scaffold makes the shame.

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

Capital punishment is the source of many an argument, both good and bad.