Top 63 Guillotine Quotes & Sayings

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!

Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it.

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

I shall die in the belief that to make France free, republican and prosperous, a little ink would have sufficed - and only one guillotine.

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

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.

With no guillotine, 'A Tale of Two Cities' would have been a travel guide.

The knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine; the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots.

I thought law school was more like the guillotine. I didn't really think I would make it; I just thought this is one of the few ways to potentially get respect, to go to law school.

Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

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.

What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine.

Terror, terror, terror. Life was a reign o terror in the shadow of the guillotine.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I can’t believe you were going to call me a liar and take my place under the guillotine. Next time I try to save you, woman, you better stay saved. (Fury)

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."

I've been watching things like 'Master of the Flying Guillotine' since I was 5.

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

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Guillotine is my specialty. I love it.

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.

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

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

In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.

I saw a picture of a girl using an eyelash curler when I was a kid, and I thought it was some sort of torture device, the eye guillotine.

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.

Somewhere within the concept of justice, the worst of the guilty must always be removed. I cannot divorce this, not completely. The people must have justice and so I want to reinstate and enshrine the blessed and holy guillotine!

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

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

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.

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.

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

I mean, I could go ahead and cut my head off in the guillotine, and it looks great, ... Well, now you turn on CNN and guys are really getting their heads cut off. ... As insane as our fantasy world gets, it's nowhere near as scary as reality.

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.

Everybody knows a guillotine choke, and most know how to get to one. But if you can create a different way to get to that choke, then you're going to surprise people. However, that will only happen one time, because once it gets used that one time, everyone will see that and start to train for it.

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.

How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?

The guillotine was most effective and used until fairly recently.

If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals - With no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.

There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

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.

Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!

The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine.

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