#executioner

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. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade. The scaffold is an image. It is not merely a framework, a machine, a lifeless mechanism of wood, iron, and rope. It is as though it were a being having its own dark purpose, as though the framework saw, the machine listened, and the mechanism understood; as though that arrangement of wood and iron and rope expressed a will. In the hideous picture which its presence evokes it seems to be most terribly a part of what it does. It is the executioner's accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#execution #executioner #france #scaffold #death

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner. ↗

— Omar N. Bradley

#continue #develop #executioner #may #our

I knew from the moment I heard you, the moment I saw the gun and realized that this lovely, petit woman was the executioner, that you would never die waiting for me to save you - that you would save yourself. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#anita-blake #executioner #fiction #hunter #jean-claude

Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner. ↗

— Thomas Browne

#charity #enemy #every #every man #executioner

If the executioner goes, my package will never be made public. If he doesn't go, it will be made public exactly fifty years from the day the bill for a moratorium on capital punishment is defeated. ↗

— Caryl Chessman

#capital #capital punishment #day #defeated #exactly

But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner. ↗

— John Donne

#executioner #i #i am #i do #my own

Revenge proves its own executioner. ↗

— John Ford

#own #proves #revenge

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#executioner #nice #perhaps #victim #would

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows. ↗

— Lucretius

#apply #blows #dungeon #executioner #goad

And as the hour approached for the execution, in his own mind, Collins became both the executioner and the victim. He would pace up and down, transformed in almost a kind of exorcism when he knew he was responsible for taking someone's life. ↗

— Liam Neeson

#approached #became #both #collins #down