Guillotine Best Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument. — Robert Cormier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tumbril on his way to the Guillotine. — Charles Dickens

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