I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.
Death
We as Americans believe it’s OK to kill people. We believe it’s OK to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We think it’s OK to invade a country where we think Osama Bin Laden is and he’s in the other country. So we just go in and we just kill. And we have the death penalty; we sanction it.
It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.
We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
Who am I? Not the body, because it is decaying; not the mind, because the brain will decay with the body; not the personality, nor the emotions, for these also will vanish with death.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
You don’t have people chanting ‘Death to America’ in Israel.
At the solemn moment of death, every man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the personal becomes one with the individual and all-knowing ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole chain of causes which have been at work during his life.
Emigration is no longer a solution; it’s a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they’re knocking on doors that are not open.
For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.