Mario Cuomo Quotes

Capital punishment is vindictive – it is vengeful.

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

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 death penalty will seem to the next generation, as it seems to many even now, an anachronism too discordant to be suffered, mocking with grim reproach all our clamorous professions of the sanctity of life.

I'm actually really opposed to the death penalty.

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

I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

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

My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.

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

Just vengeance does not call for punishment.

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

I believe in the death penalty.

I do say that I am in favor of the return of the guillotine and that is for the worst of the worst of the guilty.

I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: (1) Irreversibility in the event of an error in justice; (2) detrimental moral influence on those who have to carry out the procedure.

If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by our friends the murders.

Malcolm is worthy of death.

Does capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means. It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them.

He was condemned to lose his eyes and genitals, a merciful punishment, for he deserved to be hanged

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.

I feel morally and intellectually required to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

I want to see if she is serious about the death penalty.

People believe in capital punishment to the extent that it seems to be fair, but if fairness is in question, they prefer life imprisonment…. The death penalty as a way of deterrence is just not turning out to be true.

The criminal law stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite.

As a society are we going to murder people to show that murder is wrong