Death Sentence Quotes

• 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

  Cancer, Disease, Patient

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

  48 Copy quote

  Show source

• AIDS is no longer a death sentence for those who can get the medicines. Now it's up to the politicians to create the "comprehensive strategies" to better treat the disease.

  William J. Clinton

  Fighting, Medicine, Hiv

  48 Copy quote

• After years spent in Washington, I have become more aware than ever of the government's ineptness and the likelihood of its making mistakes. I no longer trust the U.S. government to invoke and carry out a death sentence under any conditions.

  Ron Paul

  Mistake, Years, Government

  "Can Ron Paul and Conservative Evangelicals Save a Texas Death-Row Inmate?" by Stephanie Mencimer, www.motherjones.com. November 26, 2014.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction. My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive).

  Antonin Scalia

  Practice, Justice, Demand

  1994 Copy quote

• The age of 40 is not a death sentence.

  George Foreman

  Boxing, Age, Sentences

  7 Copy quote

• I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity.

  Jodie Foster

  Creativity, Various

  Source: film.avclub.com

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• Definitely you don't become famous by doing something bad; that's a professional death sentence. You remember that whatever you do, someone will be watching, and you study all the time. It sounds terrible, but you get used to it. I'm 45, and I'm still at school, essentially.

  Julie Payette

  School, Study, Remember

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  David Letterman

  Retirement, Russia, Utah

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Children, Book

  Jim Butcher (2008). “White Night: A Novel of the Dresden Files”, p.23, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The people I have no feeling for are professional killers. But I count that man no worse than a governor who won't commute a death sentence because it's unpolitical.

  F. Lee Bailey

  Men, People, Feelings

  1 Copy quote

• After 15 years of work I have achieved, as a common German soldier and merely with my fanatical willpower, the unity of the German nation, and have freed it from the death sentence of Versailles.

  Adolf Hitler

  Years, Soldier, Unity

  Proclamation, 21 Dec. 1941

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date.

  Simon Wiesenthal

  Crime, Jew, Sentences

  0 Copy quote

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

  Yusuf Hamied

  Disease, Today, Illness

  4 Copy quote

• There's a death sentence for your Robin of Locksley.

  Claude Rains

  Robins, Sentences

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Comfort, Spirit

  12 Copy quote

• Life--a lifelong death sentence.

  Julian Tuwim

  Lifelong, Sentences

  2 Copy quote

• The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Luxury, Hours, Wells

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1979). “Five novels”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Space, Vanishing, Disappear

  "Cornel West, 'Living And Loving Out Loud'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. October 29, 2009.

  2 Copy quote

  Show source

• These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.

  Potter Stewart

  Lightning, Way, Unusual

  3 Copy quote

• My grandmother has kept all of his stuff in a drawer. This one notebook was particularly chilling. He's [howard Brookner] writing to his parents knowing he has a death sentence; his movies are how he'll live on.

  Aaron Brookner

  Notebook, Writing, Grandmother

  "William Burroughs Documentary: Howard Brookner’s Movie Re-Released After Decades Out Of Print". www.huffingtonpost.com. December 6, 2017.

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Mean, Atlanta, Agony

  "Elton John on AIDS: Compassion is Part of the Cure". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. July 24, 2012.

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• To hell with your cancer. I've been living with cancer for the better part of a year. Right from the start, it's a death sentence. That's what they keep telling me. Well, guess what? Every life comes with a death sentence, so every few months I come in here for my regular scan, knowing full well that one of these times - hell, maybe even today - I'm gonna hear some bad news. But until then, who's in charge? Me. That's how I live my life.

  Walter White

  Cancer, Years, Knowing

  "Breaking Bad: Hermanos". TV Series, 2011.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• My brother the vampire, whose kiss was a slow death sentence, had a stable and loving relationship with a girl who was crazy about him. By contrast, I could barely talk to a woman, at least about anything pertaining to a relationship. Given that my only long-term girlfriends had faked their own death, died, and broken free of enslaving enchantments to end the relationship, the empirical evidence seemed to indicate that he knew something I didn't. Keep your life tonight, Harry. Complicate it tomorrow.

  Jim Butcher

  Girl, Brother, Crazy

  0 Copy quote

• We don't have any real justice in the legal system, you never see a headline that reads, Millionaire Gets Death Sentence.

  Garrison Wynn

  Real, Justice, Legal System

  0 Copy quote

• The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

  Evelyn Waugh

  Suspense, Lips, Hunger

  0 Copy quote