Correcting bad habits cannot be done by forbidding or punishment.
Where does guilt and punishment lie, and are we not more expressive over remorse or guilt when other people see the badness in us?
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
It's time to join the ranks of nations that have put the ugliness of capital punishment behind them.
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
I contend that it's impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment.
The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment - in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes - outweighs the risk of error.
I'm very much interested in getting prisons off the stock market. I'm very much interested in upgrading the public school system... and taking a second look at capital punishment.
Capital punishment is the source of many an argument, both good and bad.
I support capital punishment. But let's be clear: It's a decision for each state to make.
If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.
Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.
And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.
But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder.
I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.
The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder.
My wife runs the charity Reprieve, and so rendition, droning, and capital punishment are very much the topics of our dinner table because of that.
I am passionately opposed to capital punishment, and I have been all my life.