Quotes About Executioners

“How does one address ... the master of the vampire executioners? My lord? Your grace? Your stakeness?”

— Colleen Gleason

“It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part
time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.”

— Gail Caldwell

“Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part
time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.”

— Gail Caldwell

“This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It”

— Jonathan Littell

“As much as he loathed himself for it, he couldn't stop thinking about Abigail. If he hadn't met her, he might be married to someone else. Some nice woman who didn't throw dishes at him. He'd be asleep right now, lying on his side with her warm body snuggled up against his chest, and their children
yes, he was quite sure there would have been two or three of them
would be sound asleep in the next room dreaming of sugarplums or whatever kids dreamed about. If he hadn't met Abigail, he certainly wouldn't be stuffed like a slab of meat in the back of a car with his own executioners.”

— J.S. Bailey

“It's strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next.
After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility, hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves helpless.
We strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells us the same thing: life is one great meaningful experience in a meaningless world. Brilliance has many parts, yet each part is incomplete.
We live, heal and attempt to piece together a picture worth the price of our very lives.
The picture I saw presented demonic executioners, who crippled those daring to look and consumed souls without defense. They're everywhere. Some are people we know. Others are the great fears and addictions of our lives.”

— Christopher Hawke

“The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.”

— Jürgen Moltmann

“What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”

— David Berlinski

“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

“There is a singular strand running through history, always renewing itself, that of fanatics for the general good and for the written law. Logical to the point of inhumanity, pitiless towards others as towards themselves, these servants of abstract gods and of absolute law accept the role of executioners, because they wish to be the last executioner. They deceive themselves because, once dead, the world no longer obeys them.”

— Maurice Druon

“She was still doing forty knots, driving in under the guns of the enemy, guns at maximum depression, when "A" magazine blew up, blasted off the entire bows in one shattering detonations. For a second, the lightened fo'c'sle reared high into the air" then it plunged down, deep down, into the shoulder of a rolling sea. She plunged down and kept on going down, driving down to the black floor of the Arctic, driven down by the madly spinning screws. The still thundering engines her own executioners.”

— Alistair MacLean

“God said, "Thou shalt not kill" - does the theft of a little money make it quite all right for us to do so? If it's said that this commandment applies only to illegal killing, what's to prevent human beings from similarly agreeing among themselves to legalize certain types of rape, adultery, or perjury? Considering that God has forbidden us even to kill ourselves, can we really believe that purely human arrangements for the regulation of mutual slaughter are enough, without any divine authority, to exempt executioners from the sixth commandment? Isn't that like saying that this particular commandment has no more validity than human laws allow it? - in which case the principle can be extended indefinitely, until in all spheres of life human beings decide just how far God's commandments may conveniently be observed.”

— Thomas More

“The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw.”

— Anthony Marra

“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

“The language marches in step with the executioners.
Therefore we must get a new language.”

— Tomas Gosta Transtromer

“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

“When one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed.”

— Mary Shelley

“Yet heaven bless thee, my dearest Justine, with resignation, and a confidence elevated beyond this world. Oh! how I hate its shews and mockeries! when one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge. Yet this is not consolation for you, my Justine, unless indeed that you may glory in escaping from so miserable a den.”

— Mary Shelley

“Death was the judge. The Reapers were the executioners. Death was the one who decided who the Reapers would visit and exact their justice.
The Reapers answered to just one entity - Death.”

— Donna Grant

“Reapers are the hands of Death. Death might be the judge, but the Reapers are the executioners. They police all Fae."
"So kill the bastards."
Taraeth glanced at his glass. "MNo one knows who the Reapers are. No one as even seen Death. We can't fight what we don't see or know."
"So ... you're afraid of some whispers?"
"What do you think has been hunting the Fae besides the Kings? The Reapers."
Mikkel made a sound at the back of his throat. "Has anyone ever seen one of these Reapers?"
"You see one, you die."
"Of course you do," Mikkel scoffed.”

— Donna Grant

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

— Tom Robbins

“Principles are what people have instead of God.
To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbour's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.
Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them.
'Principle' is an even duller word than 'Religion'.”

— Frederick Buechner

“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“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

“Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.”

— Grant Morrison

“A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.”

— George R.R. Martin

“Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners.”

— Marcel Proust

“Even the written evidence offered by the executioners tells us that. And it ended with Anastasia not being buried with the rest of her family." Yakov paused. "The DNA experts can speculate all they want, but they still can't say with absolute certainty that any of the bones later found belonged to her. I doubt they ever will." I felt dazed. "How can I know that your version of events is true?”

— Glenn Meade

“And confronting these men, wild and terrible as we agree that they were, there were men of quite another kind, smiling and adorned with ribbons and stars, silk stockinged, yellow gloved and with polished boots; men who insisted on the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right, of bigotry, ignorance, enslavement, the death penalty and war, and who, talking in polished undertones, glorified the sword and the executioners' block. For our part, if we had to choose between the barbarians of civilization and those civilized upholders of barbarism we would choose the former.”

— Victor Hugo

“He was fine; he, that orphan that foundling that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked full in the face that society from which he was banished, and into which he had so powerfully intervened; that human justice from which he had snatched its prey; all those tigers whose jaws perforce remained empty; those myrmidons, those judges, those executioners, all that royal power which he, poor, insignificant being, had foiled with the power of God.”

— Victor Hugo

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

— Jose Rizal

“Look at the Chandra Levy case. It's become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.”

— Graham Greene

“Finally, it is no longer completely fantastic to think that a day may come when not the executioners alone will deny the inalienable rights of men, but when even the victims will not be able to say why it is that they are suffering injustice.”

— Josef Pieper

“First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it's not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affection of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners nor victims.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“He needed some aromatherapy to clear his mind. He needed some time in the sauna. He felt stupid. He had never before felt stupid. His mother said stupidity should be a capital offense, except with so many stupid people everywhere you looked, there wouldn't be enough steel in the world to build all the necessary guillotine blades or enough executioners to operate them.”

— Dean Koontz

“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

“Rude cross lay flat upon the barren earth and on it was bound a man-half-naked, wild of aspect with his corded limbs, glaring eyes and shock of tangled hair. His executioners were Roman soldiers, and with heavy hammers they prepared to pin the victim's hands and feet to the wood with iron spikes.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

“In addition to the original Executioner series I have also written a number of other works with diverse taste, even poetry. None, however, have provided the pleasure of touching so many people from so many lands as have the Executioners.”

— Don Pendleton

“Prison officials have been more concerned about sparing the sensitivities of executioners and witnesses than protecting the condemned prisoner from pain. They are more concerned with appearances than with the reality.”

— Jamie Fellner

“How admirable and beautiful is the simplicity of the Evangelists! They never speak injuriously of the enemies of Jesus Christ, of His judges, nor of His executioners. They report the facts without a single reflection. They comment neither on their Master's mildness when He was smitten, nor on His constancy in the hour of His ignominious death, which they thus describe: And they crucified Jesus.”

— Jean Racine

“Many great ideas go unexecuted, and many great executioners are without ideas. One without the other is worthless.”

— Tim Blixseth

“It's ironic that the Bible belt is the killing belt - Texas, Florida, Alabama, Virginia, and so forth, Georgia. Chief executioners.”

— Joseph Lowery

“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.”

— Marquis De Sade

“I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.”

— Sam Hamill

“If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.”

— Albert Camus

“What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?”

— Albert Camus

“If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“How often has providence convinced its observers, upon a sober recollection of the events of their lives, that if the Lord had left them to their own counsels they had as often been their own tormentors, if not executioners!”

— John Flavel

“The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.”

— Ludwig Von Mises