Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

Doing a thing by law, or according to law, is only carrying the law into execution. And punishing a man by, or according to, the sentence or judgment of his peers, is only carrying that sentence or judgment into execution.

Keep out of Chancery [English court] .... It's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.

The judge must then address to the prisoners the following sentence: We, the judge, etc., do assign to you,------, such and such a day for the continuation of the tortures, that from your own mouth the truth may be heard, and that the whole may be recorded by the notary.

We have far more plea bargains in our system than we do trials.

[The] penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety.

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.

I've never hanged a man. It is the law that has done it.

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.

Your thought describes laws, courts, judges, punishments. Mine explains that when man makes a law, he either violates it or obeys it. If there is a basic law, we are all one before it. He who disdains the mean is himself mean. He who vaunts his scorn of the sinful vaunts his disdain of all humanity.

According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take "a harder stance" on the death penalty. What's a harder stance on the death penalty? We're already killing the guy? How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair?

Somewhere within the concept of justice, the worst of the guilty must always be removed. I cannot divorce this, not completely. The people must have justice and so I want to reinstate and enshrine the blessed and holy guillotine!

We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.

to move the wheels of justice is a ponderous business.

It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground, send them all to their maker and he'll settle them down.

The duty of a judge is to administer justice, but his practice is to delay it

The people I have no feeling for are professional killers. But I count that man no worse than a governor who won't commute a death sentence because it's unpolitical.

I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery.

The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison.

The presumption of innocence only means you don't go right to jail.

Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.