{"quotes":[{"text":"They're going to get the death penalty. They'll be strung up and made to be laughed at out in the streets and made examples of!","author":"Brad McKinniss","tags":["death-penalty","sadness"],"id":29824,"author_id":"Brad+McKinniss"},{"text":"If the Pentateuch is inspired, the civilization of of our day is a mistake and crime. There should be no political liberty. Heresy should be trodden out beneath the bigot's brutal feet. Husbands should divorce their wives at will, and make the mothers of their children houseless and weeping wanderers. Polygamy ought to be practiced; women should become slaves; we should buy the sons and daughters of the heathen and make them bondmen and bondwomen forever. We should sell our own flesh and blood, and have the right to kill our slaves. Men and women should be stoned to death for laboring on the seventh day. 'Mediums,' such as have familiar spirits, should be burned with fire. Every vestige of mental liberty should be destroyed, and reason's holy torch extinguished in the martyr's blood.","author":"Robert G. Ingersoll","tags":["bible","bigot","brutal","burning","christianity","civilization","crime","death-penalty","divorce","forever","heathen","heresy","holy","husbands","inspired","judaism","kill","liberty","martyr","mental","mistake","mothers","murder","pentateuch","politics","polygamy","sabbath","sell","slaves","spirits","stoning","the-bible","torth","wander","weeping"],"id":64294,"author_id":"Robert+G.+Ingersoll"},{"text":"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.","author":"Helen Prejean","tags":["death-penalty","injustice","justice","pain","poverty","social-justice","suffering","systems"],"id":88009,"author_id":"Helen+Prejean"},{"text":"[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 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of.","author":"Helen Prejean","tags":["an-eye-for-an-eye","capital-punishment","criminal-justice","criminal-justice-system","death-penalty","death-row","executions","government","human-rights","inalienable-rights","law","right-to-life","right-to-live","torture"],"id":99934,"author_id":"Helen+Prejean"},{"text":"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 shake hands with somebody.He was. He was going to shake hands with death.He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.('3 Kills For 1').","author":"Cornell Woolrich","tags":["corporal-punishment","death","death-penalty","death-sentence","electric-chair","execution","fear","imagination"],"id":99936,"author_id":"Cornell+Woolrich"},{"text":"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).","author":"Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini","tags":["death-penalty","electric-chair","historical-fiction"],"id":159745,"author_id":"Yasmin+Tirado-Chiodini"},{"text":"I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera.Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the 'forests of symbols.'(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.).","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["adolescence","baudelaire","capital-punishment","childhood","confusion","death","death-penalty","infantile","maturity","motor-vehicle-accident","real","reality","sign","signification","surreal","symbolism"],"id":167836,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.","author":"Jean-Jacques Rousseau","tags":["death-penalty","government"],"id":200572,"author_id":"Jean-Jacques+Rousseau"},{"text":"If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.","author":"Lenny Bruce","tags":["anti-catholic","anti-christian","catholicism","christianity","crucifixion","death-penalty","electric-chairs","execution","jesus-christ","rosaries"],"id":200659,"author_id":"Lenny+Bruce"},{"text":"People who change their religion should face the death penalty.","author":"Zakir Naik","tags":["apostasy","bigotry","death-penalty","fanaticism","islam","religion"],"id":208181,"author_id":"Zakir+Naik"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":28,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}