“ [T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The… Helen Prejean
“ The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to. Anton Chekhov
“ If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses. Lenny Bruce
“ Our law is a Jordanian law that we inherited, which applies to both the West Bank and Gaza, and sets the death penalty for those who sell land to Israelis. Yasser Arafat
“ I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate. Jack Kevorkian
“ Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. J.R.R. Tolkien
“ 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
“ I believe that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. Neil Gaiman
“ It would take me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough. Helen Prejean
“ Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to sha… Cornell Woolrich
“ The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been don… George Bernard Shaw
“ It's absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may - may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it's clear that - that the death penalt… Antonin Scalia
“ But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God. Victor Hugo
“ When I arrived in France aged 20, I marched against the death penalty, which was an unpopular thing to protest against at the time. Jane Birkin
