Quotes & Sayings About Electric Chair

There's a way to do an acid trip like Harold & Kumar, and there's a way to be on acid. What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that (electric) chair in Dead Man Walking. These are the guys that I look up to. — Shia Labeouf

On March 1, 1907, New Jersey passed a law authorizing execution by electrocution, thus becoming only the third state in the nation to adopt electrocution as its form of capital punishment. Until that time, most states hanged condemned prisoners. Carl Adams, the founder of Adams Electric in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, built this electric chair, known as "Old Sparkey. — Mark W. Falzini

Before we snap to judge someone who's done a horrible crime, is it possible that all of us in the worst possible circumstances could be capable of something like that? So it's about not judging people before really considering what the circumstance was and that not all murderers are created equal. We have a tendency in our society to just say murder? Cut and dried. Go away forever. Or maybe you should have the electric chair yourself. — Jack Black

But let us say he was (guilty). Let us for a moment say he was (guilty). What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this. — Ernest Gaines

I visit my assistant mistress. "Well, Azalea," I say, sitting in the best chair, "what has happened to you since my last visit?" Azalea tells me what happened to her. She has covered a sofa, and written a novel. Jack has behaved badly. Roger has lost his job (replaced by an electric eye). Gigi's children are in the hospital being detoxified, all three. Azalea herself is dying of love. I stroke her buttocks, which are perfection, if you can have perfection, under the capitalistic system. "It is better to marry that to burn," St. Paul says, but St. Paul is largely discredited now, for the toughness of his views does not accord with the experience of advanced industrial societies. — Donald Barthelme

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.
He was. He was going to shake hands with death.
He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.
("3 Kills For 1") — Cornell Woolrich

a labor and delivery room that contained some very interesting equipment. It made me only slightly less comfortable than that time I got to sit in an actual electric chair. You know, for giggles. — Darynda Jones

In Sing Sing Prison, in a ghastly white room stands a chair. Its parts are heavy joinings of oak, riveted and screwed together; its strong legs fastened to the floor with teeth and claws of steel. It bites into the marrow of men with fangs of fire. For this is the faldstool of bloody human justice, the prayer-chair of man's vengeance upon man. Into it are strapped ... men who have killed other men. In it, for a high moral purpose, erring human lives are shocked across the barrier into night and the grave. - Edward H. Smith (1918) — Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

You'd be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background color matches the drapes. — Andy Warhol

What a thrill that will be if I have to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme thrill. The only one I haven't tried. — Albert Fish

It's absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may - may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it's clear that - that the death penalty, in and of itself, is not considered cruel and unusual punishment. — Antonin Scalia

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course. — Stephen King

To talk of atomic energy in terms of atomic bombs is like talking of electricity in terms of the electric chair. — Pyotr Kapitsa

And are they consistent with the injuries inflicted by the electric chair, with — Patricia Cornwell

To Flora, the doorbell sounded like the electric chair. Not — Kate DiCamillo

When I was in junior high school, the teachers voted me the student most likely to end up in the electric chair. — Sylvester Stallone

I never staged a coup. They picked me up. Like I say, they forced me to become premier, maybe hoping that by that way, they send me to the electric chair. — Nguyen Cao Ky

Stanley wondered if this was how a condemned man felt on his way to the electric chair - appreciating all of the good things in life for the last time. — Louis Sachar

In Eastern Europe, we are suspicious of the 'h' and the 'j.' The 'h,' when it is small, looks like a chair. Is it an electric chair? We don't know. Is it a regular chair sitting on a trap door? Again, we don't know. When it's big, the 'H' is always dangerous. If you pass under it, maybe the bar will fall on you. If you go over it, possibly the bar will shoot up when you're halfway across. And the 'j,' whether big or small, is always a hook. In Eastern Europe, we don't get caught. — James Marshall

A 'school-at-home' approach to homeschooling is just decorating the electric chair in different colors. — Joseph Chilton Pearce

Some comics get drunk before a show. I don't. When I get drunk, I don't want to stand in front of a bunch of people that I don't know. That does not sound comfortable. Why have all these people gathered? And why am I elevated and not facing the same way as everyone else? And what is this electric stick in my hand? I want a chair too! — Mitch Hedberg

Going to the electric chair will be the supreme thrill of my life. — Albert Fish

The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one's self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past
never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never
concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out. — Henry Miller

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

She has an electric blender, electric toaster and electric bread maker. She said "There are too many gadgets and no place to sit down!" So I bought her an electric chair. — Red Skelton

My uncle's dying wish - he wanted me on his lap. He was in the electric chair. — Rodney Dangerfield

Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality. As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The Death House back then was a self-contained unit, with its own hospital, kitchen, exercise yard and visiting room. The cells were inadequate, dark, and did not have proper sanitary facilities or ventilation. One window and skylight furnished the ventilation and light of the entire unit. Twelve cells were on the lower tier, six on each side, facing each other, with a narrow corridor between them. Five cells were located in an upper tier. There was an area the prisoners called the Dance Hall that housed a prisoner to be executed on his last day. The narrow corridor connected the Dance Hall to the execution room, where the Electric Chair resided. The prisoners named this corridor the Last Mile or the Green Mile, because this was the last walk a prisoner would take all the way to the small green riveted door at the end of the corridor, on his way to the execution room. — Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

It took time for the church to come to terms with the ignominy of the cross. Church fathers forbade its depiction in art until the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine ... Now, though, the symbol is everywhere: artists beat gold into the shape of the Roman execution device, baseball players cross themselves before batting, and cancy confectioners even make chocolate crosses for the faithful to eat during Holy Week. Strange as it may seem, Christianity has become a religion of the cross
the gallows, the electric chair, the gas chamber, in modern terms. — Philip Yancey

I expect you (William Whitelaw) were as impressed as I was to read of the recent electrocution in Florida of a character called John Spenkelink in the electric chair. It seems that a full six minutes passed before Spenkelink was dead, during which time he hopped about like a prawn on a hot plate. — William Donaldson

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said Tennessee is the first state to reintroduce the electric chair without giving prisoners an option. — Anonymous

If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair, and a five percent chance for escape which are you going to vote for? The electric chair, because youre likely to win? — Michael Badnarik

According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take "a harder stance" on the death penalty. What's a harder stance on the death penalty? We're already killing the guy? How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair? — Jay Leno

And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all. — Henry Miller

Anna Marie Hahn begged and screamed for her life as she was being strapped into the electric chair. On December 7, 1938 she became the first woman in the state of Ohio to be executed. The last word goes to Arsenic Anna herself: "God above will tell me what made me do these terrible things. I couldn't have been in my right mind when I did them. I love all people so much. — Les Macdonald

Justice is to social justice like a chair to an electric chair. — Janusz Korwin-Mikke

(You wouldn't believe how many people will hang up a picture of an electric chair? especially if it matches the color of their curtains. — Andy Warhol

Remember how I found you there alone in your electric chair, I told you dirty jokes until you smiled. — Billy Joel

The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair. — J. Edgar Hoover

Now they're really amused, and burst into laughter. Someone tries a variation while still clapping hands: 'Clipped prick ... clipped prick.' Whereupon they begin alternating while clapping their hands: 'Jew ... Clipped prick ... Jew ... Clipped prick.' It seems they're no longer angry, merely having a good time. I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate [ ... ] — Jacobo Timerman

Mom always said I was born to sit in the electric chair, but I'm proving her wrong. I'm going to die on my knees, begging for my life. — Bauvard

In the Seventies, a lot of executions via electric chair failed because of technical problems. Seed tells the true story of someone who survived and sought revenge. They buried him alive to make it seem he was dead. — Uwe Boll

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair-
hanging like an oasis on his air
of lost connections ... — Robert Lowell

The physiological effects of an electrocution are severe and painful. Besides launching the body into violent convulsions, the electrocution of a human being causes massive destruction throughout the body. — Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn't. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things. — Kurt Vonnegut

bewildering feeling of being rushed, things are happening too quick. Too fast. I figured I couldn't get into any worse trouble than murder. Johnny and I would be hiding for the rest of our lives. Nobody but Dally would know where we were, and he couldn't tell anyone because he'd get jailed again for giving us that gun. If Johnny got caught, they'd give him the electric chair, and if they caught me, I'd be sent to a reformatory. I'd heard about reformatories from Curly Shepard and I didn't want to go to one at all. So we'd have to be hermits for the — S.E. Hinton

We talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn't. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.
We got drunk. — Kurt Vonnegut

Capital punishment, that thing scares me, it really does. I was talking to my friend about the electric chair, and he starts freakin' out. He's like 'the electric chair? That's too good for these people. That's too good for them'. Alright, how do we make the electric chair worse? How about this? They have to pedal a car battery to their own head. Is that ok? Is that enough, Mr. Hitler? — Dave Attell

You know who doesn't get the death penalty? Crazy people. That's a defense in America. My client's crazy. He doesn't know what he did. Fine, then he doesn't know we're gonna kill him. If a guy's that retard, you put him the electric chair and tell him it's a ride. — Bobby Slayton

Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? 'French Fries!'"
Convicted murderer James French to members of the press who were witnesses at his execution by the State of Oklahoma in the electric chair in 1966. — James French

Have you noticed how the Republicans and Democrats try to copy each other at their conventions. Like at the Democratic convention John Kerry's daughter told a story about how he once gave CPR to her hamster. At the Republican convention the Bush girls are going to tell a story about how when their hamster was bad, their dad built them a little electric chair. — Jay Leno

Now the Tombs, like the name says, are so horrible that they had to close it down. Today it doesn't exist and people go in the electric chair and all that. — Gregory Corso

A cross with yellow roses. What a fucking thing. It was like an electric chair with floral-print cushions, a bad joke. — Anonymous

I've come out many times publicly in support of the death penalty. I've stated that I'd be more than willing personally to pull the switch on some of the monsters I've hunted in my career with the FBI. But Bruno Hauptmann just doesn't fit into this category -- the evidence just wasn't, and isn't, there to have confidently sent him to the electric chair. To impose the one sentence for which there is no retroactive correction requires a far higher standard of proof than was seen here. Blaming him for the entire crime was, to my mind, an expedient and simpleminded solution to a private horror that had become a national obsession. — John E. Douglas