A Quote by Albert Camus

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Albert Camus

Quote Topics

Because Been Centuries Check Claims Constant Crime Death Death Penalty Equilibrium Forces Hold Instincts Law Man Often Penalty State Trying Why

Quote Author

Albert Camus
French - Philosopher
November 7, 1913 - January 4, 1960

Given my experience, I believe there are three compelling reasons why the death penalty should be replaced. (1) The criminal justice system makes mistakes and the possibility of executing innocent people is both inherently wrong and morally reprehensible; (2) My personal experience and crime data show the death penalty does not reduce crime; and (3) The death penalty wastes precious resources that could be best used to fight crime and solve thousands of unsolved homicides languishing in filing cabinets in understaffed police departments across the state.

George Gascon

Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?

Marquis de Sade

Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.

Thomas Francis Meagher

If it comes to a question of law, the charges they brought against me - the Espionage Act - is called the quintessential political crime. A political crime, in legal terms, is defined as any crime against a state, as opposed to against an individual. Assassination, for example, is not a political crime because you've killed a person, an individual, and they've been harmed; their family's been harmed. But the state itself, you can't be extradited for harming it.

Edward Snowden

The death penalty has been one of many examples where racial discrimination has played out. You can see it in the simple fact that someone convicted of the same crime is more likely to face the death penalty if they are black.

Pete Buttigieg

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

Mark Twain

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

Thomas B. Macaulay

I stand with crime victims, members of the law enforcement community, and advocates for justice in opposing a repeal of the death penalty.

Chris Sununu

My faith teaches that life is sacred. That's why I personally oppose the death penalty. But I take my oath of office seriously, and I'll enforce the death penalty... because it's the law.

Tim Kaine

If I had admitted my guilt, it would have been the same as putting my head on the chopping block - lifetime ban. Death penalty. I spent my entire life on the baseball fields of America, and I was not going to give up my profession without first seeing some hard evidence ... right or wrong, the punishment didn't fit the crime, so I denied the crime.

Pete Rose

Under current law, there is no additional penalty for someone who enters the United States illegally and then commits either a crime of violence or a drug trafficking offense. They simply come under the same penalty as we have in current law.

John Shadegg

In the last 10 years, in narcotics task forces, in a number of violent crime task forces, we've worked very closely together with state and local law enforcement.

Robert Mueller

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

H. G. Wells

The [abortion] excommunication affects all those who commit this crime with knowledge of the penalty attached, and thus includes those accomplices without which the crime would not have been committed.

Pope John Paul II

There are many factors that affect crime rates. But we recognize that the main reason crime has decreased has always been - and always will be - the dangerous and stressful work done by state and local law enforcement officers day in and day out.