Against Death Penalty Quotes

An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed in retaliation. ~ Coretta Scott King

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. ~ George Ryan

Can the state, which represents the whole of society and has the duty of protecting society, fulfill that duty by lowering itself to the level of the murderer, and treating him as he treated others? The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process. ~ Kofi Annan

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty. ~ Angela Davis

I had concluded when I was the prosecutor that I would vote against the death penalty if I were in the legislature but that I could ask for it when I was satisfied as to guilt. ~ Janet Reno

We as the Church need to express wherever appropriate and wherever possible our stance against the death penalty. We need to talk about it. A lot of people don't feel comfortable in doing this but I think we need to, as the Pope says, preach the whole gospel of life. ~ Gabino Zavala

I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished. ~ Jack Kemp

With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death. ~ Elie Wiesel

I support the death penalty. But I also think there has to be no margin for error. ~ George Ryan

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders. ~ Albert Camus

Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgments as anger. No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal upon the account of his own choler; why then should fathers and pedants be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger? It is then no longer correction bat revenge. Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and should we suffer a physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient? ~ Michel De Montaigne

I wonder if these death penalty proponents would still hold that it's worth some risk of error if it were their loved one who was murdered by the state, though innocent. ~ Antoinette Bosco

Atten. Pray of what disease did Mr. Badman die, for now I perceive we are come up to his death? Wise. I cannot so properly say that he died of one disease, for there were many that had consented, and laid their heads together to bring him to his end. He was dropsical, he was consumptive, he was surfeited, was gouty, and, as some say, he had a tang of the pox in his bowels. Yet the captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the consumption, for it was that that brought him down to the grave. ~ John Bunyan

Grief is shameless; it refuses to be ignored. If you let it have its way, it becomes fatal. If you try to remove it piece by piece, it only multiplies like a tumor. And if you try to fight it, it becomes like quicksand; you try to claw your way back to the surface, and for a second you feel the fresh air against your face, thinking you've survived, only to be pulled fiercely back down again, swallowed whole, nothing left. ~ Zeina Kassem

In all outward aspects he remained patient and mild now, not caring even to speak against heretics; he knew that he was likely to die soon enough, but the prospect of death was not an unwelcome one ( ... ). More retained his hair shirt as he dwelled in his chamber, and is reported to have whipped himself for penitence; he fasted on the appointed days, sang hymns and prayed both day and night. ~ Peter Ackroyd

The great political, artistic, and religious project of modernity has been to find a meaning to life that is not rooted in some great cosmic plan. ...But we are still convinced our lives have meaning. As of 2016, humankind indeed manages to hold the stick at both ends. Not only do we possess far more power than ever before, but against all expectations. God's death did not lead to social collapse. Throughout history prophets and philosophers have argued that if humans stopped believing in a great cosmic plan all law and order would vanish. Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and his all-encompassing plans. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

A tear slipped from eye, as I stood helpless beside Kiran. "They have done nothing wrong, except fight for the freedom you have stolen from them, from all of us!" I shouted back, unable to stay silent when my friends stood at his mercy.
"I give you freedom, the freedom to live your life as you please," Lucan challenged, tilting his chin with pride and sincerity. "I ask nothing of you, except for your loyalty. I am the king, it is the least of what I deserve," Lucan turned to address the kingdom, his argument ringing through the air.
"Then why is it only your bloodline that is allowed immortality?" I argued, taking a step forward. "Why do the rest of our people suffer from the separation of races? Why are the Shape-shifters exiled by penalty of death? What have they done? What is their crime? Are you afraid to share true immortality? Are you so scared of a people that realize they don't need a king?" I turned to face the crowd too, hoping to empower them with my words. ~ Rachel Higginson

If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival. ~ Kiese Laymon

Julian made a noise. It was a noise Emma couldn't have described, not as human a sound as a how or a scream. It sounded like it was ripped out of the inside of him, like something brutal was tearing through his chest. He dropped the longsword Livvy had risked so much to bring him, fell to his knees and crawled to her, pulling her into his lap.
'Livvy, Livvy, my Livvy' he whispered, cradling her, feverishly stroking her blood-wet hair away from her face. There was so much blood. He was covered in it in seconds; it had soaked through Livvy's clothes, even her shoes were drenched in it. 'Livia' His hands shook; he fumbled out his stele and put it on her arm.
Emma felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. There were wounds that were beyond and iratze's power. Healing runes only vanished from skin when an occupational poison was involved--or when the person was already dead.
'Livia,' Julian's voice rose, cracking and tumbling over itself like a wave breaking too far out to sea. 'Livvy, my baby, please, sweet- heart, open your eyes it's Jules, I'm here for you, I'm always here for you, please,please--'
Blackness exploded behind Emma's eyes. The pain in her arm was gone; she felt nothing but rage. Rage that bleached everything else out of the world except the sight of Annabel cringing against the lectern, staring at Julian cradling his sister's dead body. At what she'd done. ~ Cassandra Clare

Stupid girl, you should have let me die, he thought. Specks of light could be seen against the night sky, distant windows and flickering streetlamps. How many times had he wished for death, for a killing blow? But it seemed the gods weren't done with him yet. ~ T.L. Shreffler

You realize that by summoning me here, you signed your own death warrant." Demons were nothing to take lightly. I'd seen what they were capable of, but I also knew they were no match against the light that shone inside me. "I do," it said, and I fought to place the language we were speaking. I knew it was ancient. Possibly the first language ever spoken in the universe. "Unless we sign yours first." "Is that what you think will happen here?" "Dutch," Reyes said into my ear, "stop playing with your dinner. ~ Darynda Jones

You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in. ~ Josephine Humphreys

It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye. ~ Kristin Cashore

In Sing Sing Prison, in a ghastly white room stands a chair. Its parts are heavy joinings of oak, riveted and screwed together; its strong legs fastened to the floor with teeth and claws of steel. It bites into the marrow of men with fangs of fire. For this is the faldstool of bloody human justice, the prayer-chair of man's vengeance upon man. Into it are strapped ... men who have killed other men. In it, for a high moral purpose, erring human lives are shocked across the barrier into night and the grave. - Edward H. Smith (1918) ~ Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

A science can diagnose a cancer and can even find a cure for it, but it can't, and a scientist will be the first to say, it's can't help you to deal with the stress and disappointment and terror that comes with a diagnosis, and nor can it help you to die well, like Socrates, kindly, not railing against faith, but in possession of your own death. For these imponderable questions people have turned to mythos. ~ Karen Armstrong

I will simply die, as you will simply die, when our hearts stop beating. And instead of the fires of Hell or the clouds of Heaven, there will be a chorus of hungry worms or fish, depending on how we go. Isn't that what really terrifies you most of all, why you force yourself against all reason to believe in such tales? It's because you're afraid of the nothingness at the end. You're ashamed of it. ~ Cliff James

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London's organic power – somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

That was the night he got up and went to the boys' division; perhaps he was looking for his history in the big room where all the boys slept, but what he found instead was Dr. Larch kissing every boy a late good night. Homer imagined then that Dr. Larch had kissed him like that, when he'd been small; Homer could not have imagined how those kisses, even now, were still kisses meant for him. They were kisses seeking Homer Wells.
That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside - glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx - a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to srnell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap's distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn't grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela's office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx's helplessness on the ice had rendered its expression both terrified; and resigned; both madness and fatali ~ John Irving

It [the Holocaust] is something like a religion ... The Intellectual Adventure is that we are reversing this entire trend within the space of one generation - that in a few years time no one will believe this particular legend anymore. They will say, as I do, that atrocities were committed. Yes, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, but there were no factories of death. All that is a blood libel against the German people. ~ David Irving

Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50 ~ Karen Armstrong

Even today there still exists in the South
and in certain areas of the North
the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today
especially in the southern half of the nation
armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, main or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Huge, dizzying, clumps and clusters of snow falling through the air, patches of white against an iron-gray sky, snow that touches your tongue with cold and winter, that kisses your face with its hesitant touch before freezing you to death. Twelve cotton-candy inches of snow, creating a fairytale world, making everything unrecognizably beautiful ... ~ Neil Gaiman

The work directed against mosquitoes carrying yellow fever had an equally good effect upon malaria, especially when anti-anopheles work was extended to the suburbs of the city. Before the year 1901 Havana had yearly from 300 to 500 deaths from malaria, rising as high in 1898 as 1,900 deaths. Since 1901 there has been a steady decrease in the malaria death rate until 1912, when there were only four deaths. Four deaths from malaria in a city in the tropics the size of Havana, about 300,000 population, means the extinction of malaria in that city. ~ William Crawford Gorgas

The boxes that are supposed to help us understand one another ultimately wedge us further apart. Even worse is that we rage against the artificial divisions the boxes create, claim that we're more complex and complicated than how we're defined by others, and then turn around and stuff the next person we meet into one and tape the lid shut. And then, as if the indignity of life isn't enough, when a person dies, we cram what's left of them into one final box for eternity. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

Let go."
"Make me let you go."
She looked at Arin. Whatever he saw in her eyes loosened his hands. "Kestrel," he said more quietly, "I have been whipped before. Lashes and death are different things."
"I won't die."
"Let Irex set my punishment."
"You're not listening to me." She would have said more, but realized that his hands still rested on her shoulders. A thumb was pressing gently against her collarbone.
Kestrel caught her breath. Arin startled, as if out of sleep, and pulled away.
He had no right, Kestrel thought. He had no right to confuse her. Not now, when she needed a clear mind.
Everything had seemed so simple last night in the close dark of the carriage.
"You are not allowed," Kestrel said, "to touch me."
Arin's smile was bitter. "I suppose that means we are no longer friends."
She said nothing.
"Good," he said, "then you can have no reason for fighting Irex."
"You don't understand."
"I don't understand your godforsaken Valorian honor? I don't understand that your father would probably rather see you gutted than live with a daughter who turned away from a duel?"
"You have very little faith in me, to think that Irex would win."
He raked a hand through his short hair. "Where is my honor in all this, Kestrel?"
They locked eyes, and she recognized his expression. It was the same one she had seen across the Bite and Sting table. The same one she had seen in the pit, when the auctioneer ~ Marie Rutkoski

This must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy's life-line and of protecting our own." By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially "accessories to the crime," that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been given no alternative but to await another assault on the Suez Canal, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line - the narrow front of southern Palestine - an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties. ~ Scott Anderson

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death. ~ Upton Sinclair

The liberals' present furor over the CIA's covert operations against al-Qaida suggests that they harbor a death wish not only for themselves but also for the whole country. ~ Bob Tyrrell

It is an expensive government program with the power to kill people. ~ L. Brent Bozell, Jr.

Heroes do not dwell in a time of peace; heroes are hardened in a kiln against the sorrows. Their troubles sharpen the blade and make it gleaming. The glint becomes a brightness that is raised high on a hill, allowing women and men to see beyond themselves. For light swallows darkness. Truth buries death. Heroes are not born. They are filled by Music. ~ David Paul Kirkpatrick

And this evening when I close my eyes against the darkness and think about her, I'll imagine iridescent wings fluttering, if only for a moment, against cloudless blue skies. ~ Nancy Stephan