"Death penalty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the grounds that "It was unbecoming a Christian government to supply the infidels with the means of persevering in their errors." Another one of the Emperors, more zealous than his predecessors, decreed the death penalty against all persons discovered practicing any of the rites and ceremonies of the old religion. Thus the onslaught of Christian savagery obliterated the civilization of Greece and Rome, and inaugurated that long reign of intellectual night known as the Dark Ages, which, materially aiding ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... with general disapproval. It was held that had the prince been captured on French territory, he could have been tried under a law which in this case carried the death penalty, but that to go and seize him beyond the frontiers, in a foreign land, was a gross infringement of ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... indeed, all the senate, because they had charged the consuls with the protection of the city, by which act it was permitted the latter to take such steps, and subsequently had voted to condemn Lentulus and the rest who at that time suffered the death penalty. Cicero, however, incurred the responsibility alone or most of all, because he had laid information against them and had each time made the proposition and put the vote and had finally seen to their execution by the agents entrusted with such business. For this reason ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... They admitted a share of the responsibility for having set in motion a vast juggernaut chariot, which, however, they had arrested, but hoped to expiate past errors by future zeal. At the same time they urged that it was not they who had demoralized the army or abolished the death penalty or thrown open the sluice-gates to anarchist floods. On the contrary, they claimed to have reorganized the national forces, reintroduced the severest discipline ever known, appointed experienced ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... enlargement of the meaning of the phrase 'emancipation of woman' has been fortified with a strange advocacy by the female 'champions of their sex.' Their argument runs this way: 'We are denied a voice in the making of the laws relating to infliction of the death penalty; it is unjust to hold us to an accountability to which we have not assented.' Of course this argument is as broad as the entire body of law; it amounts to nothing less than a demand for general immunity from all laws, for to none of them has woman's assent been asked or given. But let us ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... that would shelter him and his followers. No sooner, however, was he settled at Shawomet, than the Massachusetts authorities laid claim to the territory, and it was only after arrest, imprisonment, and a narrow escape from the death penalty, followed by a journey to England and the enlisting of the sympathies of the Earl of Warwick, that he made good his claim. Gorton returned in 1648 with a letter from Warwick, as Lord Admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plantation affairs, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... Death penalty, inflicted for— witchcraft, 1. threatening witnesses, 3. perjury, 3. theft, 4. receiving stolen goods, 4. buying from domestic inferior, 7. taking on deposit from domestic inferior, 7. in default ...
— The Oldest Code of Laws in the World - The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon - B.C. 2285-2242 • Hammurabi, King of Babylon
... States, it was in Arkansas. In 1860, a man was hung at Napoleon for reading The Tribune. It is an open question whether the character of the paper or the man's ability to read was the reason for inflicting the death penalty. ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... would have been the glory of the greatest men of antiquity. Philanthropy, in spite of the ridicule which sometimes attaches to its name, will remain, in the eyes of posterity, the most honorable characteristic of our time: the abolition of the death penalty, which is merely postponed; the abolition of the stigma; the studies regarding the effects of the cellular system; the establishment of workshops in the prisons; and a multitude of other reforms which I cannot even name,—give evidence of ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... erected under the eaves of the cells. Though his relations and friends cried, "Our son is gone mad; his confession is but the outcome of his distemper and the raving of lunacy, and it is unlawful to inflict on him the death penalty," he continued to exclaim, "I am in my right mind, perfect in service and sacrifice." .... Now he had a sweet young child; and they, hoping to work upon his parental love, brought the boy to him that he might renounce his faith. But ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... The Old Law inflicted the death penalty for the more grievous crimes, viz. for those which are committed against God, and for murder, for stealing a man, irreverence towards one's parents, adultery and incest. In the case of thief of other things it inflicted punishment by indemnification: while in the case of blows and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... woman ought to suffer death, her accusers might have said that he was defying the existing authorities; and possibly the charge of opposition to the Roman government might have been formulated, since power to inflict the death penalty had been taken from all Jewish tribunals; and moreover, the crime with which this woman was charged was not a capital offense under Roman law. Had He said that the woman should go unpunished or suffer only minor infliction, the crafty Jews could have charged Him with disrespect for the law ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... old time the President of the Church was the temporal as well as spiritual head. No one might doubt his "revelations" or dispute his commands without being visited with punishment which ran from a fine to the death penalty. When outsiders invaded their regions the Mormons, by command of Brigham Young, struck them down, as in the Mountain Meadows murders. This was in the day when the arm of national power was too short to reach them. Now, when ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... murder, but that he had been out of the city in a resort on the San Leandro Road. The unfortunate Gluck received life imprisonment in San Quentin, while the newspapers and the public held that it was a miscarriage of justice—that the death penalty should have been ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... idea (let us remark in passing), to think that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement, the Greve, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the Marche ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... in Chicago have been made heartsick during the past month by the knowledge that a boy of nineteen was lodged in the county jail awaiting the death penalty. He had shot and killed a policeman during the scrimmage of an arrest, although the offense for which he was being "taken in" was a trifling one. His parents came to Chicago twenty years ago from a little farm in Ohio, the best type of Americans, whom we boast ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the prisoner Cantril was deferred, owing to serious illness. During the progress of the trial, Anderson committed suicide, and Daniels escaped. [It will be remembered that H.H. Dodd, convicted of treason in Indianapolis, some months ago, and sentenced to suffer the death penalty, also escaped. Neither Daniels or Dodd have been recaptured.] The evidence before the Military Commission elicited most of the important facts embraced in this narrative, and therefore need ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... most absolute innocence, the prosecutor demands the death penalty, based on denunciations of the police, representing me as the chief of the world's Anarchists, directing the labor syndicates of France, and guilty of conspiracies and insurrections everywhere, and declaring that my voyages to London and Paris were ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... with our Committees, they betray us to the enemy, they apply the death penalty to our agitators; and the counter-revolutionary Government supports them. We thought that the Revolution would bring peace. But now the Government forbids us even to talk of such things, and at the ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... history of an institution must be explained by pointing to the special causes in operation during the time when the change was in progress. Thus the restriction of the death penalty, in the nineteenth century, to so few offences was due partly to the growth of humane feelings, partly to the belief that the infliction, or threat, of the extreme penalty had failed to enforce the law and had demoralised the administration of Justice. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read |
