Guillotine Quotes

Marie Antoinette. Her last words were,"Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it,"to a man whose foot she stepped on before she was executed by the guillotine

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light.

I put my head out of my window and see how much the wind’s knife wants to slice it off. On this unseen guillotine, I’ve placed the eyeless head of all my desires.

Terror, terror, terror. Life was a reign o terror in the shadow of the guillotine.

The guillotine was most effective and used until fairly recently.

But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it's for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!

There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

When we experience fear, it cuts us off from our power. It cuts us off from knowledge and experience. It is a guillotine that falls and separates.

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

I shall die in the belief that to make France free, republican and prosperous, a little ink would have sufficed - and only one guillotine.

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

The old farm roads a four lane that leads to the mall, and our dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall.

Farewell, my children, forever. I go to your Father.

The guillotine has to fall somewhere when the team under-produces, and more times than not it's fallen on me.

If you want to get into a good entrepreneurial business, guillotines may be in fashion.

If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.

The old terms must be invented with new meaning and given new explanations. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are no longer what they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. This is what the politicians will not understand; and that is why I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions- external revolutions, political revolutions, etc. But that is only dabbling. What is really needed is a revolution of the human spirit.

The whole famous Reign of Terror [of the 1790s] in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists [the anti-Communards of 1871] executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?

I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.

Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.

Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world - the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine. It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented hair from turning gray, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals - With no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.

The reason the lawyers lead the line to the guillotine or the firing squad is that, while law is supposed to be a device to serve society, a civilized way of helping the wheels go round without too much friction, it is pretty hard to find a group less concerned with serving society and more concerned with serving themselves than the lawyers.

Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it.

In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine.

I can’t believe you were going to call me a liar and take my place under the guillotine. Next time I try to save you, woman, you better stay saved. (Fury)

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Part of my platform is, of course, the guilty must be punished and that we no longer let our children see their guilty leaders getting away with murder. Because it teaches children, you know, that they don’t have to have any morals as long as they have guns and are bullies and I don’t think that's a good message. . . . I do say that I am in favor of the return of the guillotine and that is for the worst of the worst of the guilty.

If you are a guillotine producer, watch out your head; because wickedness is a boomerang.

Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition.

Somewhere within the concept of justice, the worst of the guilty must always be removed. I cannot divorce this, not completely. The people must have justice and so I want to reinstate and enshrine the blessed and holy guillotine!

I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

Sink me! Your taylors have betrayed you! T'wood serve you better to send THEM to Madam Guillotine

How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

Then, as she turned to walk away, Fred dropped the guillotine."So we're making Ev CEO," he said, his fork clenched in his hand. "You're going to get a passive chairman role and a silent board seat. We have some paperwork for you and a recommendation for a lawyer."Jack felt like he had just been hit in the face with a baseball bat. "Say that again," he stuttered to Fred, thinking he had heard incorrectly.Fred repeated himself almost verbatim: We're making Ev CEO. You're getting a passive chairman role. You will have a silent board seat. Here's the paperwork. Call a lawyer.

Your services might be as useful as a barbershop on the steps of a guillotine.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

For misdirected love, the attainment of its object is, indeed, the best cure; but it cures as the guillotine cures headache.

What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine.

What opposite discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses, one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

A people that is able to say everything, becomes able to do everything. The crowd which follows me with admiration, would run with the same eagerness were I marching to the Guillotine.