Potter Stewart Quotes

The death penalty only should be - if you agree with it, which I don't, only allowed for murder. You have to murder someone to get the death penalty.

I feel capitol punishment is dooming U.S.A.

You will be excellently executed.

Capital punishment, that thing scares me, it really does. I was talking to my friend about the electric chair, and he starts freakin' out. He's like 'the electric chair? That's too good for these people. That's too good for them'. Alright, how do we make the electric chair worse? How about this? They have to pedal a car battery to their own head. Is that ok? Is that enough, Mr. Hitler?

Execution halts your breath, helter skelter spiral death.

Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

I have the death sentence in seven genres.

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?

How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?

Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of little consequence. They constitute a portion of the population that is worse than useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example be set by it, is never a matter of reasonable regret with any one. If they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or smallpox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the operation.

Henceforth, there shall be no more execution by beheading with an axe.

I want to accelerate, not slow down, the enforcement of the death penalty in Florida.

Now in Utah if you get the death sentence, they have the firing squad. In Russia, they call that early retirement.

That's why I'm a big supporter of the death penalty. I want to be the hangman. I would put many more people to death like the kids who want to kill other people, I'd put 'em to death.

Remember the death penalty is murder.

All that's missing for Utah is a blindfold and a cigarette.

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!

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 great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

Most people are not affected by [the death penalty]. It's like how many people are actually sent to Iraq and Afghanistan? Such a small percentage.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

The punishment of criminals should be of use; when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.