Quotes about Executioners

Joseph de Maistre

All power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner …. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

Albert Camus

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

George MacDonald

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.

Rand Paul

No president has the right to say he is judge, jury and executioner.

Jose Rizal

The people no longer has confidence in its former protectors, now its exploiters and executioners. The masks have fallen.

Nigel Cawthorne

The bodies of victims were ... the hangman’s property. Although obliged to sell the corpses of murderers to surgeons for dissection purposes, the executioner sometimes sold them back to the families if they offered a better price. It was often difficult to keep the body intact as the crowd would grab pieces as macabre souvenirs. On 18 December 1758, a riot broke out when the medics fought the family for possession of the victim’s body – however, the mob won and carried the corpse away in triumph. The hangman would also be allowed to cut up the rope that was used in the execution and sell bits off in the pubs on Fleet Street.

John Dos Passos

The warden strapped these men into the electric chair / the executioner threw the switch / and set them free into the wind / they are free of the dreams now / free of the greasy prison denim / their voices blow back in a thousand lingoes singing one song / to burst the eardrums of Massachusetts.

Marquis de Sade

Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch's soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their attention on that area of it that is already lacerated.

Bob Dylan

The executioner's face is always well hidden.

Tom Heinsohn

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 Robbins

He who jokes in the executioners face can be destroyed, but never defeated.

Gore Vidal

Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.

Juvenal

Conscience, the executioner, shaking her secret scourge.

Bamberg, Germany

The poor sinner was weak and ill, so she had to be led to the scaffold. When she sat down on the chair, Master Valtin the executioner walked around her like a cat walks around hot broth. He held the sword a span from her neck, took aim, and struck the blow, but missed her neck and struck off a slice of her head as big as a coin, knocking her from the chair. Then the poor soul got up quicker than she had sat down, this blow having done no harm to her. Then she started to beg to be let go, as she had been so brave. But to no avail. She had to sit down again. The assistant then wanted to take the sword from Master Valtin and strike her himself, but the master would not permit this and struck her again himself. The second blow was a little stronger and she fell from the chair. Then he cut off her head as she lay on the scaffold. The executioner received his reward as he went. He would have been stoned to death if the town guard and their arms had not rescued him. As it was, much blood was already streaming from his head.

Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.

Tanith Lee

Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

Thomas Browne

Yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.

Laurell K. Hamilton

I am the Executioner. Murder someone in my town, and I’m the one that you get to see. Once.

Howard Zinn

And in such a 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.