Charles Krauthammer Quotes

I don't believe in the death penalty, but I understand personal vengeance.

I believe that capital punishment serves no useful purpose and is a form of revenge.

Every punishment is based, not on logic or the feeling of justice, but on the desire to wish evil on those who have done evil to you or to another person…. Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

Capital punishment is vindictive – it is vengeful.

What's wrong with the death penalty is that it satisfies this penchant we have for vengeance.

My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.

No trait is more justified than revenge in the right time and place.

Just vengeance does not call for punishment.

I'm actually really opposed to the death penalty.

It is not according to my mode of doing things, to bring a suit against a man that I have the power in my own hands to punish.

Justice is revenge.

Audiences like to see the bad guys get their comeuppance.

I believe in the death penalty.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Those who favor capital punishment do so in the name of justice. Can there be any argument against insisting that it be imposed justly—and not on the wrong people.

Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.

The criminal law stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite.

I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

Justice should not admit a public's thirst for pure revenge.

Revenge is more wild, less calculated...deeply personal. Retribution is a punishment that is morally right and fully deserved. (Mitch Rapp)

Revenge is not a noble sentiment, but it is a human one.

Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

I find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and nothing will happen to him unless she does something to stop him.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.