The Guillotine Quotes

#1. Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument.

Robert Cormier

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

Dustin Penner

#3. The guillotine was most effective and used until fairly recently.

Herbert Lom

#4. 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.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#5. 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.

Victor Hugo

#6. If you want respect, you must take your medicine like a brave aristocrat," he said. "Think of the French nobles who walked to the guillotine, double chins aloft.

Loretta Chase

#7. Now I have discovered where it is that she goes. It's the guillotine that draws her, across the river in the Place Louis Quinze- Place de la Revolution now-where daily crowds gather, the vendors selling lemonade, the children playing prisoner's base, the old ladies gossiping as the heads fall.

Sandra Gulland

#8. During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity.

Emmuska Orczy

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

P.G. Wodehouse

#10. If our school ever performed a play about the French Revolution, she could play the guillotine.

Robin Benway

#11. 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.

Roseanne Barr

#12. It went automatically to a heavy-weight mother with beetling eyebrows who looked as if she had just come from doing a spot of knitting at the foot of the guillotine.

P.G. Wodehouse

#13. 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.

Albert Camus

#14. I mean, I could go ahead and cut my head off in the guillotine, and it looks great, ... Well, now you turn on CNN and guys are really getting their heads cut off ... As insane as our fantasy world gets, it's nowhere near as scary as reality.

Alice Cooper

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

Victor Hugo

#16. Even then, she still held a secret passion for Mozart. When he died in 1791, her grief made her provoke the people into starting the French Revolution. Stepping up to the guillotine herself, she ordered the executioner to behead her, thereby committing assisted suicide.

Yasutaka Tsutsui

#17. I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.

Patti Smith

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

Albert Camus

#19. When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering.

Steven Pinker

#20. At first they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale.

Hilary Mantel

#21. Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?

Dennis Cooper

#22. He committed suicide in 1794 because the Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine.

Clive James

#23. While a friend expects more and more favors, and seethes with jealousy, these former enemies expected nothing and got everything. A man suddenly spared the guillotine is a grateful man indeed, and will go to the ends of the earth for the man who has pardoned him.

Robert Greene

#24. In 1800, in the first interparty contest, the Federalists warned that presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson, because of his sympathy expressed at the outset of the French Revolution, was 'the son of a half-breed Indian squaw' who would put opponents under the guillotine.

Robert Dallek

#25. I want you now so awfully, No longer jealous-green, I bring myself as offering Up to the guillotine.

Osip Mandelstam

#26. The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts
Its click
Creates perpetual motion
("The Head")

Blaise Cendrars

#27. Not one of the European rulers would put himself about in the attempt to save Marie Antoinette, so that Mercy scornfully declared: "They would not have tried to save her even if they had with their own eyes seen her mounting the steps to the guillotine.

Stefan Zweig

#28. The happily ever after thing. It's great when she marries the prince or whatever and they say that. But they just don't show the part where there's a revolution and they drag her to the guillotine.

Mark D. Diehl

#29. 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.

Marquis De Sade

#30. 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

Marie Antoinette

#31. 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.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#32. 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.

Wallace Stevens

#33. 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)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

Ivan Panin

#35. Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

Grant Morrison

#36. tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.

Charles Dickens

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

Milan Kundera

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Camille Desmoulins

#40. Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die")

Cornell Woolrich

#41. 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.

Federico Garcia Lorca

#42. I twist like a flower
at the sound of your voice
But you leave the receiver
static most days
You have me growing into a dial tone

All it would take is your voice
saying my name
And I would behead myself
to be carried around on your lapel

Kait Rokowski

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

Hans Arp

#44. Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!

Charles Dickens

#45. The earl could have made Napoleon comfortable in a room sporting a guillotine.

Melissa Lynne Blue

#46. 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.

Susan Neiman

#47. Charlotte Corday walked alone Paris birds sang sugar calls Charlotte walked down lanes of stone through the haze of perfume stalls Charlotte smelt the dead's gangrene Heard the singing guillotine

Peter Weiss

#48. Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.

Terry Teachout

#49. There is a new Barbie doll on the market. It's called Marie Antoinette Barbie with removable head; guillotine included!

Various

#50. I'm not like that fellow who thought it a far, far better thing to trade his life for that of another. I'm nothing like him: I'd never volunteer to lay my head in the lap of Madame la Guillotine. No, that fellow was a hero and I'm not a hero at all.

Franny Billingsley

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

Clare Boothe Luce

#52. Among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face.

Roberto Bolano

#53. We may remain more or less open-minded on the subject of the death penalty, indisposed to commit ourselves, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes.

Victor Hugo

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

Rowan Atkinson

#55. Sarcasm is a shaving cream pie waiting at the bottom of a guillotine's basket.

Dan Adams

#56. The knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine; the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots ...

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#57. There is a wealth of time and money the size of an aircraft carrier for planning wars, but the amount of time and money for helping soldiers when they get home is more akin to the size of a guillotine.

Thor Benson

#58. We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against ... Death belongs to God alone.

Victor Hugo

#59. 'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.

Victor LaValle

#60. This isn't an accident; this happens because to people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below. They need to watch us. They need to monitor what we're thinking. It's the only thing between them and a guillotine.

Max Barry

#61. The loss inside him kept piling - vertebrae shattered, finger bones lost, gravestone past and guillotine future, ghost woman and her ghost curls,

Ryan Graudin

#62. 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!

Roseanne Barr

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

Charles Dickens

#64. It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.

Dave Eggers

#65. The "sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine," was hardly known to him, or to the generality of people, by name.

Charles Dickens

#66. A knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of all of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine, the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots, and the path of paradox lies along the blade of the knife--the only path worthy of the mind without fear. . . .

Yevgeny Zamyatin