Quotes & Sayings About Death Sentence

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person. — Ernst Junger

Baylon wasn't sure he could conceal his craving for her, the need that clawed and ripped through him to declare Jordyn as his. It would be a death sentence, but to live without her ... that was also a death sentence. — Donna Grant

There are only three real causes of death, Will Henry. The first is accidents - diseases, famines, wars, or like what befell your parents. The second is old age. And the third is ourselves - our slow suicides. Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, and I will show a man living under a death sentence. — Rick Yancey

A death sentence was a death sentence, no matter how carefully it was worded. — Robert Ferrigno

The compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. — Vladimir Nabokov

The verdict of this court is that the accused are guilty of witchcraft. The maximum penalty the law allows is to be burned to death.However, in view of your previous good background I am disposed to be lenient. I therefore sentence you to be burned alive. — Richard Curtis

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened. — Donna Tartt

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life. — Amy Hempel

I have the death sentence in seven genres. — Jasper Fforde

It's true that the hatred is still there. But it doesn't change anything. Our obligations are the same - to live and sanctify all life with our own. To participate in the world the best we know how, leaving it a better place than we found it. To raise families and teach our children to value life. What more can we do? Should we refuse to live because of the threat of death hanging over us? We've always been under sentence of death. Every generation that lives out its days in peace is a victory. Every day we live is a victory. — Ovadya Ben Malka

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.
He was. He was going to shake hands with death.
He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.
("3 Kills For 1") — Cornell Woolrich

Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. — Cat Stevens

The sentence of the first murderer was pronounced by the Supreme Judge of the universe. Was it death? No, it was life. 'A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth'; and 'Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that's ahad a profound impact on my life. He said, "The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything." Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba. — Brennan Manning

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of others those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition. — Blaise Pascal

When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to show up again. And it isn't. But it doesn't matter-another one will, and it'll probably be better. And I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it-and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. — Toni Morrison

Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity. — Robert A. Heinlein

The Saudis, and in some cases the CIA, had encouraged and funded their foreign jihads, and these men had seen combat, lived hard in the mountains, did what their religion asked them to do. Then they came home to Egypt and were rewarded with a death sentence. The result was the creation of a standing army of jihadis who couldn't go home. They would go on to found al-Qaeda, which became something of a jihadi veterans association. History is always obvious in retrospect, but in this case the rise of al-Qaeda should have been fairly easy to predict. — Richard Engel

If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship. — Terry Pratchett

It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The thing about living with a death sentence for so long is you tend to miss the moment life starts to get better because you're so ready for it to get much, much worse. — John Goode

The death penalty can be imposed fairly only after carefully considering all the reasons why death might not be the appropriate sentence — Bryan Stevenson

Recognize him as such, too. Yes, he had disobeyed his queen. So had many others, who'd never been punished so harshly. Had the crime he'd committed merited a death sentence? There were other Seelie who felt as he did, who wanted a return to — Karen Marie Moning

In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, "the Quack," was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world's memory. — Laura Hillenbrand

Pessimism is a luxury of good times. In difficult times, pessimism is a self- fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence. — Evelin Lindner

I'm sorry. I shouldn't be asking such things ... ' She let the sentence die its own death — Markus Zusak

We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity. — Cornel West

There are just some people you cannot find the good in. But who am I to decide if someone should be killed for murdering a child ... instead of for murdering a drug addict during a deal that went bad ... or even if we should be killing the inmate himself? I'm not smart enough to be able to say which life is worth more than the other. I don't know if anyone is. — Jodi Picoult

When we started, I was delivering meals to people in Atlanta. We were a direct-care organization. And it was - people needed meals, they needed transport, they needed medication, they needed buddy systems. They had a death sentence. There was AZT, and that was just prolonging the agony, basically. Now people, of course, if they are on antiretrovirals, they face a lifetime of health, basically. I mean, it doesn't - it's I would say in the 99 percent certainty bracket that if you are on that medication, you will have a healthy life. — Elton John

I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word. — Laura Linney

Keep in mind that this appears in the same book of the Bible that approves the death sentence for a child who curses his parents, owners of oxen who injure someone through the owner's negligence, anybody who works or kindles a fire on Sunday, and anyone who has sex with an animal. — Jim Butcher

So something that never should have happened did, all because of my thoughts and actions. A clear-cut cause-and-effect relationship. I was the one who caused it, and I should probably get the death penalty. Or maybe what I should say is I'm the one who pronounced the death sentence on myself — Natsuo Kirino

Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent's funeral. — Damien Echols

You think it amusing to have a death sentence imposed on us, sire? — Darren Shan

Definitely you don't become famous by doing something bad; that's a professional death sentence. — Julie Payette

I am in favour of capital punishment if the execution of the sentence is immediate. The purpose of the death penalty is to send out a message to society. — Ujjwal Nikam

You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what every woman went through. Not that they got ripped apart, but they had no guarantees about whether they were going to live through it or not.
You know, I recently read - and I don't read nonfiction, generally - Becoming Jane Austen. That's the one subject that would get me to go out and read nonfiction. And the author's conclusion was that one of the reason's Jane Austen might not have married when she did have the opportunity ... well, she watched her very dear nieces and friends die in childbirth! And it was like a death sentence: You get married and you will have children. You have children and you will die. (Laughs) I mean, it was a terrifying world. — Stephenie Meyer

Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes. — Sufjan Stevens

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry
out a death sentence properly reached. — Antonin Scalia

In the context of the English language, there were many more important words than "in." There were fancy words, historic words, words that meant life or death. There were multi-syllabic tongue-twisters that required a sort out before speaking, and mission-critical pivotals that started wars or ended wars ... and even poetic nonsensicals that were like a symphony as they left the lips. Generally speaking, "in" did not play with the big boys. In fact, it barely had much of a definition at all, and, in the course of its working life, was usually nothing but a bridge, a conduit for the heavy lifters in any given sentence. There was, however, one context in which that humble little two-letter, one-syllable jobbie was a BFD. Love. The difference between someone "loving" somebody versus being "in love" was a curb to the Grand Canyon. The head of a pin to the entire Midwest. An exhale to a hurricane. — J.R. Ward

All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well. — Salman Rushdie

You hear the word 'cancer,' and you think it is a death sentence. In fact, the shock is the biggest thing about a diagnosis of cancer. — Clare Balding

Poverty in America today leads not only to anxiety, unhappiness, discomfort and a lack of material goods. It leads to death. Poverty in America today is a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people. — Bernie Sanders

I've come out many times publicly in support of the death penalty. I've stated that I'd be more than willing personally to pull the switch on some of the monsters I've hunted in my career with the FBI. But Bruno Hauptmann just doesn't fit into this category -- the evidence just wasn't, and isn't, there to have confidently sent him to the electric chair. To impose the one sentence for which there is no retroactive correction requires a far higher standard of proof than was seen here. Blaming him for the entire crime was, to my mind, an expedient and simpleminded solution to a private horror that had become a national obsession. — John E. Douglas

The most dangerous prayer a human being could every pray, "Lord, make me like Christ. I don't care if you have to dethrone me, I don't care if you have to tear apart my ministry, I don't care if you have to destroy me, I don't care what happens - make me like Jesus Christ!" It's practically calling a death sentence upon yourself. But then again, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it abideth alone, but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit. — Paul David Washer

What is thy sentence then but speechless death. — William Shakespeare

God knew that creating mankind was a death sentence for Jesus, but He created us anyway. — Vance C. Kessler

Drive out the demon called fear, and if it returns from exile grant it
no amnesty, sentence it to death. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Nature deemed that to be born was an automatic sentence to death, and then brought about that death with vicious consistency. We — Neal Shusterman

He paused. Perhaps he had a son. He intoned their names, and then he said, "I sentence you to death. The sentence shall be carried out by firing squad, at the customary time, in the execution yard of this prison, one week from today." Then Fabio asked, "Why a week?" as coolly and with as much detachment as a customer in a bank wanting to know why his funds had not cleared. The court president did not object to this unceremonious interruption, for the sentence was severe enough to cover any and all offenses, past, present, future, and imagined. His tone was friendly and somehow reassuring. "We need a little extra time for your friend Grigi." At this, the soldiers of the 19th River Guard, now condemned, began to laugh, and the gavel struck. — Mark Helprin

To slay the sinner is then the first use of the Law, to destroy the life and strength wherein he trusts and convince him that he is dead while he lives; not only under the sentence of death, but actually dead to God, void of all spiritual life, dead in trespasses and sins. — John Wesley

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. — Susan Sontag

I want people who have received a diagnosis of Hepatitis C to know that they didn't just receive a death sentence. They do have options, even if the person who gave them their diagnosis isn't aware of all of them. The path they choose doesn't have to be one of desperation. — Melody Beattie

Take a soldier and put him right in front of a cannon in a battle and fire it at him, and he'll go on hoping, but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier, and he'll go mad, or start to weep. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If I had to offer up a one sentence definition of addiction, I'd call it a form of mourning for the irrecoverable glories of the first time ... addiction can show us what is deeply suspect about nostalgia. That drive to return to the past isn't an innocent one. It's about stopping your passage to the future, it's a symptom of fear of death, and the love of predictable experience.
And the love of predictable experience, not the drug itself, is the major damage done to users. — Ann Marlowe

Autism is not a death sentence but a rich fulfilled life sentence so to speak. — Janet Walmsley

AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease. — Yusuf Hamied

I cherished you inconstant; what would I have done,
faithful? Now, even now, when your cruel mouth
so calmly speaks my death sentence, I wonder,
cold wretch, I wonder still, if I do not love you. — Jean Racine

Any chance of an appointment? I know it's a bit unusual and nervy, but I have been given a death sentence and have to get my affairs in quick order. — Virginia Aird

Going all in and all out for the All in All is both a death sentence and a life sentence. Your sinful nature, along with its selfish desires, is nailed to the cross. Then, and only then, does your true personality, your true potential, and your true purpose come alive. After all, God cannot resurrect what has not died. And that's why so many people are half alive. They haven't died to self yet. — Mark Batterson

In pain shall you bring forth children, woman, and you shall turn to your husband and he shall rule over you. And do you not know that you are Eve? God's sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil's gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. It was you who coaxed your way around him whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: Man! Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die ... Woman, you are the gate to hell. — Tertullian

Susan's gotta poker, you know," it said, as if anxious to be helpful.
WELL, WELL. INDEED. MY GOODNESS ME.
"I fort-thought all of you knew that now. Larst-last week she picked up a bogey by its nose."
Death tried to imagine this. He felt sure he'd heard the sentence wrong, but it didn't sound a whole lot better however he rearranged the words. — Terry Pratchett

We are like a people under [a] sentence of death, waiting for the date to be set. We sense that something is about to happen.
We know that things cannot go on as they are. History has reached an impasse. We are now on a collision course. Something is about to give. — Billy Graham

Rick to Herschel: My wife is pregnant. That is either a gift here, or a death sentence out there. — The Walking Dead

The Light of the world is not put out. Now have death and the grave been converted into the great testimonies for life and immortality. Now may each man, who has the sentence of Adam upon him, know that he is a kinsman of the Son of God. Now may he follow Him; and so, when the darkness is thickest around him and within, not walk in it, but see the Light of Life. — Frederick Denison Maurice

I maybe many things to many people; but for me I am a writer; always have been and always will be.
I may not contribute to great literatures, but my contribution to writing would be always there; etched in the minds of the people whose lives I have touched with words.
Only a writer can understand what it means to a writer to not be able to be one.
To have the nib of pen broken ... like a death sentence ..
Or a life imprisonment in one's own mind without an outlet to thoughts.
I would give up things I love the most if that's the choice I am given to be able to be what I really want to be - A writer.
(C) Arti Honrao — Arti Honrao

Now in Utah if you get the death sentence, they have the firing squad. In Russia, they call that early retirement. — David Letterman

Getting fired from work is not a death sentence — Sunday Adelaja

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation. — James Baldwin

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister. — Adam Rapp

Banquo asked me how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me. — Andrew Krivak

The Code of the Vampires decreed that anyone who violated the Sacred Law was condemned to death, the blood burning. Charles had refused to subject Allegra to the sentence. But Mimi was a different matter. Mimi walked out of the church, knowing that if she ever saw Jack again, she would have to kill him. — Melissa De La Cruz

There must be a punitive expedition against the Jews in Russia, a punitive expedition which will expect: death sentence and execution. Then the world will see the end of the Jews is also the end of Bolshevism. — Julius Streicher

At the top of the page I wrote my full name [ ... ] At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it." And then as I looked at this sentence a great deal of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur. — Jamaica Kincaid

Being single is not a death sentence. — Philip Siegel

The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death. — James Joyce

We're all sinners separated from a holy God. Because of our sin, we're under a death sentence, and we can't fix the problem by simply trying to be good. But out of his great love for us, God sent his Son, Jesus, to pay the penalty for our sins. Jesus died on the cross to reconcile us to God, and he was raised from the dead to give us new life in him. If we accept Jesus by faith, God forgives our sins and promises us eternal life. That's good news! And that's the message of the gospel. — Matt Eachus

The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Is it not He whose immortal hand ... has written there the death sentence of tyrants? He did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery and falsehood. He created the universe to proclaim His power.
[The Cult of the Supreme Being] — Maximilien De Robespierre

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. — Margaret Atwood

THIS DEATH sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna give five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for Contempt of Court, but we're gonna kill ya! — Julius Rosenberg

A death sentence will be issued, a death sentence will be implemented. A life sentence will be issued, a life sentence will be implemented. — Mohammed Morsi

The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd. — Zoltan Istvan

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. — T. S. Eliot

And in those days, if a writer had not shattered himself against his own sentences and died while doing so, I could not believe a word of what he wrote. If I did not sense, when reading, that language lay in the balance, suspended, sentence by sentence, between life and death, then the book held no interest for me. — Josef Winkler

Unfortunately for Mariners, the total amount of wave energy and storm does not rise linearly with wind speed, but to its fourth power. The seas generated by a 40 knot wind aren't twice as violence as those from a 20 knot wind, they are seventeen times as violent. The ship's crew watching the anemometer climb even 10 knots could well be watching their death sentence. — Sebastian Junger

DIAGRAMMING MY DEATH SENTENCE — James Patterson

There was a death sentence in every pair of eyes. — Stephenie Meyer

My mother thought me being gay was a death sentence. — Jai Rodriguez

In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. — Vladimir Nabokov

Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious,frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion. — Patrick O'Brian

You may pronounce the sentence upon me, honourable judge, but let the world know that in A.D. 1886, in the State of Illinois, eight men were sentenced to death because they believed in a better future; because they had not lost their faith in the ultimate victory of liberty and justice! — August Spies

The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet REvolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927- there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgement has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder. — Katherine Anne Porter

The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence. — Byron White

If I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The prisoner of doubt ends his stint [through suicide], released to the custody of that final question mark which punctuates every life sentence. — Dan Garfat-Pratt

This guy is an epic douche. Kick his shiny ass, Atticus, Oberon said.
I compartmentalized his comment and resolved to enjoy it later. I glared at this would be usurper and said in my most authoritative voice, "Aenghus Og, you have broken Druidic law by killing the land around us and opening a gate to hell, unleashing demons on this plane. I judge you guilty and sentence you to death."
Amen, Atticus! Testify! — Kevin Hearne

For the murder of Jest, the court joker of Hearts, I sentence this man to death.'
She spoke without feeling, unburdened by love or dreams or the pain of a broken heart. It was a new day in Hearts, and she was the Queen.
'Off with his head — Marissa Meyer

Trying to provoke him into a terrifying sentence, I said: The only definitive thing is death. Yes, he said, but it isn't easy to get there when one's condition is as good as yours. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Not long ago I was much amused by imagining - what if the fancy suddenly took me to kill some one, a dozen people at once, or to do some thing awful, something considered the most awful crime in the world - what a predicament my judges would be in, with my having only a fortnight to live, now that corporal punishment and torture is abolished. I should die comfortably in hospital, warm aad snug, with an attentive doctor, and very likely much more snug and comfortable than at home. I wonder that the idea doesn't strike people in my position, if only as a joke. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky