Avigdor Lieberman Quotes

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.

The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.

It's just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can't leave behind something as primitive as government-sponsored execution.

American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.

If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.

Hang 'em first, try 'em later.

If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners - they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.

Cutting necks is better than cutting the means of living.

To Aetius, thrice Consul, the groans of the Britons …. The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea drives us back to the barbarians: between them we are exposed to two sorts of death; we are either slaughtered or drowned.

… a crime against the Palestinian people.

Capital punishment is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime—for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold

You cannot like the word, but what is happening is an occupation - to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians.

I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time- after how many executions? - people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year.

By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

I was glad when the invalids were executed

The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process. Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.

I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is sadly called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed.

No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.

If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

It's convenient how everyone who supports waterboarding and torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as they like to call it, have never experienced it themselves. Yet everyone who has, myself included, are firmly against it.

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

We cannot agree that an act of plunder which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed.