William Hull Quotes

The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.

I thought it was terrible. I don't know who to believe. Williams was very loyal and honest. Nobody could ever say different. Sometimes, that got him into a lot of trouble. But after he died and they cut his head off, that made me sick.

When a mad man is executed, it is a miserable spectacle, both against law, and of extreme inhumanity and cruelty, and can be no example to others.

We will cut off his head with the crown upon it.

The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.

The death penalty is discriminatory and does not do anything about crime.

I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition.

As a reward for their efforts, however, those early Christians were beaten, stoned to death, thrown to the lions, tortured and crucified. Every conceivable method was used to stop them from talking.

Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing.

We will hang you, never fear, Most politely, most politely.

The death penalty is being applied in the United States as a fatal lottery.

This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be.

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

We've sent 130 men to death row to be executed in this country, at least 130 that we know of, who have later have been exonerated because they were either innocent, or they were not fairly tried. That's 130 people that we've locked down on death row. And they've spent years there.

Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.

Weep! There, near the edge of Sofia town / Stretches -- I saw it -- a dismal gallows / And one of your sons, Bulgaria / Hangs from it with a terrible power.

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

I do not wish to sit at the same table with a bunch of torturers.

What terms could be found to express our horrors for the organizers of such a holocaust had it taken place in darkest Africa? Yet these ministers thought they were God service: they had scripture at their fingertips.

Tell me not of rights; talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves! I deny the right--I acknowledge not the property! The principles, the feelings of our nature, rise in rebellion against it

Delivering up the Negroes to their former masters would be delivering them up—some to execution and others to punishments which would in my own opinion be a dishonorable violation of the public faith

In Iran they believe that girls who are virgins go to heaven. So when a young woman is in prison to be executed, they rape her before they kill her.

… most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical.

I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown any farther than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that saying, (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source,) that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has "made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!" Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it firmly.