“Does this old poop have any advice for young people in times of such awful trouble? Well, I'm sure you know that our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has a death penalty. And torture chambers. I mean, why screw around?

”But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: ‘This will certainly teach me a lesson.’

“If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., speech at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27, 2007, from the book “Armageddon in Retrospect.”