Guillotine Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  Artist, Revolution, Birth

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• 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

  Squad, Class, Rifles

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• 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

  Running, People, Crowds

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

  Victor Hugo

  Sight, Bishops, Shock

  Victor Hugo (1987). “Les Misérables”, Signet Classics

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• 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

  Paris, Bird, Singing

  Peter Weiss (1998). “Marat/Sade ; The Investigation ; and The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman”, p.53, A&C Black

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• If you are a guillotine producer, watch out your head; because wickedness is a boomerang.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Watches, Wickedness, Boomerang

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• 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

  Wind, Knives, Desire

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

  Dustin Penner

  Team, Fall, Hockey

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• 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

  Writing, Men, Blood

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• Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light.

  Franz Kafka

  Light, Heavy

  Franz Kafka, Joyce Crick, Ritchie Robertson (2012). “A Hunger Artist and Other Stories”, p.197, Oxford University Press

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• Any Hamas or Zionist type who tries to interfere with the labor unions and grab the money will be marched to the guillotines and subsequently beheaded. And isn't that easier and more productive than some endless, bloody conflict? So sayeth the gospel of common sense. Happy Mother's Day.

  Roseanne Barr

  Mother, Common Sense, Trying

  "12 Crazy Things Presidential Candidate Roseanne Barr Has Said About The United States" by Jordan Teicher, www.businessinsider.com. February 3, 2012.

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• Part of my platform is, of course, the guilty must be punished and that we no longer let our children see their guilty leaders getting away with murder. Because it teaches children, you know, that they don’t have to have any morals as long as they have guns and are bullies and I don’t think that's a good message. . . . 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

  Children, Gun, Thinking

  "Roseanne Barr: Behead Bankers, Rich Who Won't Give Up Wealth". www.realclearpolitics.com. October 1, 2011.

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• 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

  Blessed, Offering, Iron

  Tiffanie DeBartolo (2005). “How to Kill a Rock Star”, p.261, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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• In France, the leader of Jacobinism perished on the guillotine; with us, the change of leadership was achieved by means of arrest and banishment. The technique of the process is gentler, but its essence is the same.

  Leon Trotsky

  Mean, Essence, Leader

  Source: www.marxists.org

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• Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Gun, Knives

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• But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it's for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Cutting, Ideas, Glee

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• The old farm roads a four lane that leads to the mall, and our dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall.

  Ani DiFranco

  Dream, Fall, Reality

  Song: Subdivision, Album: Revelling / Reckoning

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• 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

  Beach, Son, Golf

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

  Rowan Atkinson

  Funny, Sarcastic, Might

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• 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

  Law, Squad, Lines

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• 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

  Hate, Political Revolution, Liberty

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• 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

  Ink, Littles, France

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• 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

  Mean, Men, Feet

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• 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

  Men, Thinking, Order

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• 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/FourSquareGospel 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

  Running, Buddhist, Book

  Ray Bradbury (2012). “Fahrenheit 451: A Novel”, p.209, Simon and Schuster

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