Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The death penalty is becoming a way of life in this country.

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.

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.

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?

Our emotions may cry for vengeance in the wake of a horrible crime, but we know that killing the criminal will not undo the crime, will not prevent similar crimes by others, does not benefit the victim, destroys human life and brutalizes society. If we are to still violence, we must cherish life. Executions cheapen life.

When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate.

I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment.

Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man's life.

The death penalty is abolished – even at the front!

The death penalty saves lives.

Capital punishment is neither cruel nor unusual.

I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time- after how many executions? - people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year.

I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization. It’s the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.

By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

I was glad when the invalids were executed

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.

Freedom or jail clips inserted, a baby's being born/ Same time a man is murdered, the beginning and end.

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

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?

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

Do they deserve to die?" but "Do we deserve to kill them?

I believe that inside many Americans lies certain uneasiness about capital punishment.

The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.

Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations.