Newt Gingrich Quotes

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

Yesterday afternoon 247 Spanish and Canary Island prisoners were decapitated. Today all the Spaniards and Canary Islanders who were sick in the hospital were decapitated, constituting the last of all those included in the order of Your Excellency.

I am pro-death penalty, but not an enthusiastic death-penalty person. I think there's a place for it, that it should serve as a deterrent.

First of all, it does not deter crime, the death penalty.

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.

… who are weekly sacrificed upon the gallows in sufficient numbers to astonish a civilized people

What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

I will make Mississippi the capital of capital punishment.

When the lever is pulled, the body twists and shudders violently, cooks and sizzles obscenely, and emits horrible noises from the nose, mouth and anus…Chapman said it was the ghastliest mode of death he could have conjured, short of slow torture, and that no sane person who witnessed it could possibly oppose its replacement by a less violent means of execution.

Henceforth, there shall be no more execution by beheading with an axe.

I'm always theoretically opposed to capital punishment as a matter of policy; like, I don't believe a state should put its citizens to death.

I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.

The death penalty is inhumane... whether that person is in a [jail] or it's bin Laden.

The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.

You will be excellently executed.

The sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.

The death sentence is a barbaric act.

I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone . . . I think, myself, that it is an obscenity . . .

Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they're quick to say, 'Put them to death,' or scream 'capital punishment.'

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.

It's absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may - may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it's clear that - that the death penalty, in and of itself, is not considered cruel and unusual punishment.

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

I do say that I am in favor of the return of the guillotine and that is for the worst of the worst of the guilty.

Execution as punishment is barbaric and unnecessary.

Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty... mine's putting in an express lane.