Executioners Quotes - Page 3

• Al-Hallaj has a special destiny. He came at a time when worldliness, the luxury, were inundating the Islamic world. His function was to act as kind of an antithesis to this, and he paid for it with his life, and he was very happy to do so. He smiled as he went to the executioner. That was done because it shook the conscience of the Islamic peoples of that time. But the vast majority, the vast, vast, vast majority of Sufis, they have not met the destiny of al-Hallaj. They have spoken about reaching "the Truth" and there is nothing dangerous about it.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Islamic, Destiny, Luxury

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• [W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?

  E. O. Wilson

  Mind, Religion, Hens

  E. O. Wilson (2014). “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, p.364, Vintage

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• Even though I saw the executioner and the fire, I could not say anything but what I have said.

  Joan of Arc

  Truth, Fire, Say Anything

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• A man in love ... is the master, so it seems, but only if his lady friend permits it! The need to interchange the roles of slave and master for the sake of the relationship is never more clearly demonstrated than in the course of an affair. Never is the complicity between victim and executioner more essential. Even chained, down on her knees, begging for mercy, it is the woman, finally, who is in command ... the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master's heels, is now really the god. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure.

  Anne Desclos

  Powerful, Women, Love Is

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• Am I missing something because of my lack of education? Being an intellectual - I'm not. So I hire him as a corner man, like a boxer; he watches me and tells me what I do wrong before I go in for the next round. Barry thought he was going to write what became Executioner's Song, and I told him he wasn't going to. And Barry's closest friend was Joan Didion.

  Lawrence Schiller

  Song, Writing, Men

  Interview with Suzanne Snider, believermag.com. May 2010.

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• If you are an executioner, don't expect to have a friend closer than a gallows!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Gallows, Ifs

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• In the most rigorous [Roman] laws, a wife was condemned to support a gamester, a drunkard, or a libertine, unless he were guilty of homicide, poison, or sacrilege, in which cases the marriage, as it should seem, might have been dissolved by the hand of the executioner.

  Edward Gibbon

  Law, Hands, Wife

  Edward Gibbon, Henry Hart Milman, Guizot (M., François), Sir William Smith (1862). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.298

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• Revenge proves itself to be its own executioner.

  John Ford

  Revenge, Prove It, Prove

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• Universities simply unable to play judge, jury and executioner when they're already having trouble playing educator. Resources are limited and colleges must put their focus on their primary objective: education.

  Claire McCaskill

  College, Play, Judging

  Source: www.elle.com

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• What I know is that if you're going to play half-court, you'd better have the greatest executioners of half-court basketball. If you run, you test the stamina and willpower of the other team. That's what I learned as a player.

  Tom Heinsohn

  Basketball, Running, Team

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• God sends such purgations to you, directors of consciences, that you may acquire the science of the saints and the art of directing souls. You will suffer also in another way. Love will be your executioner. Let it do its work; it knows how. In this martyrdom we have need of extraordinary grace and strength; but God will bestow it. Without this divine help it would be impossible to bear up.

  Paul of the Cross

  Art, Soul, Grace

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• In war, force is used by the belligerents themselves, no effort being made to bring evildoers before a judicial body, each army acting as judge, jury and executioner.

  Kirby Page

  War, Army, Judging

  Kirby Page (1976). “Kirby Page and the social gospel: an anthology”, Dissertations-G

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• After Hatuey, a fifteenth-century Indian insurrectionist, had been fixed to the stake, his Spanish captors extended him the choice of converting to Christianity and ascending to Heaven of going unrepentantly to Hell. Gathering that his executioners expected to go to heaven, Hatuey chose the other

  Kathy Acker

  Choices, Heaven, Gathering

  Kathy Acker (1994). “My Mother: Demonology”, p.13, Grove Press

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• I didn't mind being a public executioner, once I got the hang of it.

  Ashleigh Brilliant

  Mind

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• Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

  Howard Zinn

  Country, Jobs, Sex

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• At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.

  Victor Hugo

  Eye, Kissing, Fire

  Victor Hugo (2010). “The Works of Victor Hugo”, p.543, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Christianity is religion for the executioner.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Christianity

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “Twilight of the Idols”, p.44, Friedrich Nietzsche

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• At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

  Elie Wiesel

  Heart, Men, Ideas

  Elie Wiesel (2011). “Legends of Our Time”, p.190, Schocken

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• As the world continues to turn away from the use of the death penalty, it is a glaring anomaly that China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the USA stand out for their extreme use of this form of punishment as the 'top' executioners in the world.

  Irene Khan

  Iran, Punishment, Usa

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• There is one appointed supreme executioner. Truly, trying to take the place of the supreme executioner is like trying to carve wood like a master carpenter. Of those who try to carve wood like a master carpenter, there are few who do not injure their hands.

  Laozi

  Hands, Taoism, Trying

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• Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Fighting, Animal, Hands

  J. M. Coetzee (2016). “The Lives of Animals: The Lives of Animals [Princeton Classics]”, p.65, Princeton University Press

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• In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.'

  William Safire

  Order, Judging, Style

  "Essay; Seizing Dictatorial Power" by William Safire, www.nytimes.com. November 15, 2001.

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• We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Kings, Reality, Greek

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.16, Graphic Arts Books

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• Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner.

  George MacDonald

  Vengeance, Sin, Bounds

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• Just as there are predatory birds, so there are predatory ideas: I came under their spell. . . .Just as the survivors say that no one will ever understand the victims, what I must tell you is that you will never understand the executioners.

  Elie Wiesel

  Ideas, Bird, Survivor

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