The law which attempts a man's life [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.

I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.

It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

I think it's almost impossible to impose a free and liberal society from the outside.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

For fifty years Private Eye has pretty much in most issues exposed a miscarriage of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years, large numbers of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong, and the men convicted -- almost always men, there was a couple of women -- have been found innocent, so we would have killed those people, and in some of those very high profile cases which involved terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved. So on a purely practical basis, whatever you think it says about the civilised nature of your society or not, I think it would be incredibly dangerous to have capital punishment back.

In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.

Society hardly ever follows its blueprint, a fact that makes comparisons extremely difficult and judgments more than usually fallible.

I must say, extreme justice is an extreme injury: for we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal;

Now here is my point. Some of you may agree with me, and some of you may not, but in my view, it would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today.

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

To introduce into the philosophy of War itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.

To introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.

It could be surprisingly hard to counter Plain Stupid. Even by heroic measures.