If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.
When you look at the Bible, and I read the Bible very seriously, for a lot of my life, I believed the Bible ordained the death penalty, and the Bible seemed to be very clear about that. But the more I look, the more troubled I became because it's not that simple. In the Bible, there's some 30 death-worth crimes, like working on the Sabbath, or disrespecting your parents. Are we that fundamental that we should bring back that death penalty?
We have a legal system, and we have a penal code. We have the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, and people should respect this.
But too often the goal of the planners is a universal gray state of health corresponding to absence of disease rather than to a positive attribute conducive to joyful and creative living. This kind of health will not rule out and may even generate another form of ill, the boredom which is the penalty of a formula of life where nothing is left unforeseen.
My father was a local radio celebrity in the Albany area while I was growing up. That was his dream when he was a boy. I learned from him that some dreams are attainable and the penalty for inaction is regret.
Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty. . . mine's putting in an express lane.
You don't want to be giving away free-kicks in the penalty area.
Now I am dedicating that life to campaigning against the death penalty and raising awareness about human rights.
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.
a loss of sensibility follows a loss of innocence, at once a penalty and a compensation.
Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties.
It's a fundamental aspect of the free enterprise system and economics: If there's no penalty associated with increased costs, why not lay on increased costs?
Staying out of the penalty box will really help.
As the world continues to turn away from the use of the death penalty, it is a glaring anomaly that China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the USA stand out for their extreme use of this form of punishment as the 'top' executioners in the world.
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
When the penalty for a policeman's mistake is to put a criminal back out on the street, then we are hurting America; we are hurting our law-abiding citizens.
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, 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.
We need to acknowledge that the death penalty is broken beyond repair.
In ten Muslim countries you can get the death penalty just for being gay. If they were chopping the heads off of gay people in the Vatican, wouldn't there be a greater outcry among liberals?
If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize.