Quotes & Sayings About Guillotine

On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: "And I have loved Germany so. — Erik Larson

The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts
Its click
Creates perpetual motion
("The Head") — Blaise Cendrars

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

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

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

Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world
high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud
"I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing, all the time
negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive. — Mark Leyner

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? — Guy Endore

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

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine. — George Bernard Shaw

End of story. 'Happily ever after' fell on everyone like a guillotine's blade. — Michael Cunningham

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

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

There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine. — P.G. Wodehouse

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

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

The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.
But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people positively do not want to be "done good" by the humanitarian. Of course, what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine. — Isabel Paterson

It was asserted that these escapes were organised by a band of Englishmen, whose daring seemed to be unparalleled, and who, from sheer desire to meddle in what did not concern them, spent their spare time in snatching away lawful victims destined for Madame la Guillotine. — Emmuska Orczy

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

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? — Salman Rushdie

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. — Henrik Ibsen

One may feel a certain indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent; one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some — Victor Hugo

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

Allowing the war-prone individuals, bent on evil, to gain power in governments must be one of the most significant reasons that wars erupt. Individuals with prowar inclinations are naturally aggressive and seek power over others. As Friedrich Hayek argued in his book The Road to Serfdom, "the worst get on top." The power seekers also convince themselves that they are superior to average people and have a moral responsibility to use force to mold the world as they see fit. The propaganda is that war is for the sake of "goodness and righteousness." Isabel Paterson described it in her book The God of the Machine as "the humanitarian with a guillotine." Those who are more prone to peace tend to be complacent and to not resist the propaganda required to mobilize otherwise peaceful people to fight and die for the lies told and the false noble goals proposed by the self-appointed moral leaders. — Ron Paul

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

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

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

I detected sarcoma." He put his finger on his neck. "Right here."
The other man nodded
his head seemed to be nodding continually
and muttered:
"Yes. There's no possibility of operating."
"Of course not," said the old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. "There's only one thing that could remove it
the guillotine. — Henri Barbusse

There was terror in each and every one of the people on that beautiful beach and on that breathtakingly beautiful evening. Terror of being alone, terror of the darkness filling their imaginations with devils, terror of doing anything not in the manuals of good behaviour, terror of God's judgement, of what other people would say, of the law punishing any mistake, terror of trying and failing, terror of succeeding and having to live with the envy of other people, terror of loving and being rejected, terror of asking for a rise in salary, of accepting an invitation, of going somewhere new, of not being able to speak a foreign language, of not making the right impression, of growing old, of dying, of being pointed on because of one's defects, of not being pointed out because of one's merits, of not being noticed either for one's defects or one's merits. Terror, terror, terror. Life was a reign of terror, in the shadow of the guillotine. — Paulo Coelho

Watch your back, wolf. There's a pall over this place and the bears are racking up enemies faster than Wal-Mart rakes in sales. When the time comes, it's going to get bloody. (Thorn)
I wouldn't have it any other way. (Fang)
Don't be so arrogant. Long before I was the debonair sophisticate standing in front of you, I was a warlord. I put more blood on my blade than Madame la Guillotine. The one thing all that battle taught me is that no one walks away without scars. No one. (Thorn) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

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

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

The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies — Sophie Wahnich

Again, take someone who's crippled or deformed; they can't be tied to the plank without a lot of sweat and heaving, and then the crowds (who can't see much anyway) get bored and start hissing and catcalling. Meanwhile a queue builds up, and the people at the end of the queue get awkward and start screaming or passing out. If all the clients were young, male, stoical and fit, he'd have fewer problems, but it's surprising how few of them fall into all those categories. — Hilary Mantel

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

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

Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light. — Franz Kafka

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

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

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

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

Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire, a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it, and where he had expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a sort of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling ... — Victor Hugo

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

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

Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine? — Dennis Cooper

The point is obvious. 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/Four Square Gospel 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. — Ray Bradbury

I almost wish I had cancer. Then I'd either beat it or die from it. But my disease, even if successfully treated, will never go away. And it might not kill me. But it will hang over me like the blade of a guillotine; more threatening inert than if the blade suddenly slips and mercifully turns out my lights. This is my war to end all wars. — William Cope Moyers

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

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. — Charles Dickens

Everybody knows a guillotine choke, and most know how to get to one. But if you can create a different way to get to that choke, then you're going to surprise people. However, that will only happen one time, because once it gets used that one time, everyone will see that and start to train for it. — Bas Rutten

Three people were going to the guillotine. The first was a lawyer, who was led to the platform, blindfolded, and had his head put on the block. The executioner pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. To avoid a messy lawsuit, the authorities allowed the lawyer to go free. The next man to the guillotine was a priest. They put his head on the block and pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. The blade didn't come down. They thought it must have been divine intervention, so they let the priest go. The third man to the guillotine was an engineer. He waived his right to a blindfold, so they led him to the guillotine and put his head on the block. As he lay there, he said, Hey, wait. I think I see your problem. — Garrison Keillor

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

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

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

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

The loss inside him kept piling - vertebrae shattered, finger bones lost, gravestone past and guillotine future, ghost woman and her ghost curls, — Ryan Graudin

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

tumbril on his way to the Guillotine. — Charles Dickens

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

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

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

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

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

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, ... — Lord Byron

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. — Fred Rodell

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. — Frederick Lenz

Sarcasm is a shaving cream pie waiting at the bottom of a guillotine's basket. — Dan Adams

When that happens [the demise of golf], old men will furtively beckon to their sons and, like fugitives from the guillotine recalling the elegant orgies at the court of Louis XV, will recite the glories of Portmarnock and Merion, of the Road Hole at St. Andrews, the sixth at Seminole, the eighteenth at Pebble Beach. They will take out this volume from its secret hiding place and they will say: "There is no question, son, that these were unholy places in an evil age. Unfortunately, I had a whale of a time." — Alistair Cooke

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

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. — Nick Bilton

The guillotine was most effective and used until fairly recently. — Herbert Lom

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh. — Victor LaValle

The earl could have made Napoleon comfortable in a room sporting a guillotine. — Melissa Lynne Blue

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

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

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

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

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

She had stepped into the thin strip of earth that they claimed as their own. Bound by the last building on Brewster and a brick wall, they reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed warrior kings. Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by the guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million non reflective mirrors, these young men wouldn't be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon
and they knew it. They only had that three-hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom, armored tank, and executioner's chamber. — Gloria Naylor

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

March 20th. It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man's head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew! — Guy De Maupassant

But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all - but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now - this very instant - your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man - and that this is certain, certain! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

When the fermentation is over and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those that drink it."41 Franklin was wrong, sadly wrong, about the French Revolution, though he would not live long enough to learn it. Le Veillard would soon lose his life to the guillotine. So would Lavoisier the chemist, who had worked with him on the Mesmer investigation. Condorcet, the economist who had accompanied — Walter Isaacson

If our school ever performed a play about the French Revolution, she could play the guillotine. — Robin Benway

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

Buzz crouched between her feet and scrutinised as much as he could see of her perilous interior to find out if all was in order and there were no concealed fangs or guillotines inside her to ruin him. — Angela Carter

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

He needed some aromatherapy to clear his mind. He needed some time in the sauna. He felt stupid. He had never before felt stupid. His mother said stupidity should be a capital offense, except with so many stupid people everywhere you looked, there wouldn't be enough steel in the world to build all the necessary guillotine blades or enough executioners to operate them. — Dean Koontz

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

Madame Guillotine gets mad at me. Not because I told them to shove it, but because I didn't say it in French. What is wrong with this school? — Stephanie Perkins

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. — John Adams

There everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold and pleasure. Take — Honore De Balzac

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

For by giving it some hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on. If by some extraordinary chance the blade failed, they would just start over. So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time. And I say that's wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything go off without a hitch. — Albert Camus

Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government's expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI to the guillotine. — Sarah Vowell

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

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

Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine! — Charles Dickens

I feel we are becoming divergent upon the paths we are walking down. I feel we are becoming distant, as the way we see things becomes more pronounced. I feel I know you less, where once I knew you like I knew myself before. I fear that in the end, we will become no more. When that guillotine descends, friend will be friend no longer. As time ascends, we will move forward on different paths in life's Wonderland. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore