Execution Quotes

“Don't you remember how you once answered a question of mine? Me - I shall never forget your words. Those words of yours opened my eyes; they brought me the light of day. I asked you how the Germans could send Jewish children to die in the gas chambers. How, I asked, could they live with themselves after that? Was there really no judgement passed on them by man or God? And you said: Only one judgement is passed on the executioner - he ceases to be a human being. Through looking on his victim as less than human, he becomes his own executioner, he executes the human being inside himself. But the victim - no matter what the executioner does to kill him - remains a human being forever. Remember now?”
― Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing

“The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.

He was. He was going to shake hands with death.

He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.

("3 Kills For 1")”
― Cornell Woolrich, Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich

“What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man's life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.

("New York Blues")”
― Cornell Woolrich, Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich

“If it must be enjoyed, then it must be done. And if it must be done, then it must be done well. If it is done well, it is enjoyed well.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“An execution carried out in secrecy is no better than lynching from a dry branch.”
― Loren D. Estleman, The Branch and the Scaffold: The True Story of the West's Hanging Judge

“Indictment for blasphemy:

That ... the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra's fables, in profane allusion to Esop's Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Muhammad to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.”
― Thomas Aikenhead

“Whatever begun with planning, ends in a victory.”
― Amit Kalantri

“My ideas will not be discussed, they will be executed.”
― Amit Kalantri

“At first they’d thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“[Aftermath of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881]

What happened to the conspirators - Zhelyabov already in prison, Perovskaya, Kibalchich and the three surviving bombers - is that they were all hanged. This last public execution to be staged in Russia took place before a crowd of some 80,000. It was the youngest of the conspirators, eighteen-year-old Rysakov, who broke down in prison, confessed, begged for mercy, exposed as many of his comrades as he could. It did not save him from the scaffold. And on the scaffold the others coldly turned away from him, exchanging last words among themselves, leaving Rysakov to die quite alone. It was the execution of the Decembrists all over again, except that one of the hanged was a woman. There was no proper drop, only stools to be kicked away, and the stools were too low for a quick kill. Worst of all, Mikhailov's noose slipped, not once, but twice. He was heavier than the executioner, who was drunk, had bargained for. He had to be lifted up and rehanged. All took some minutes to die. Russia still had not learnt even how to hang.”
― Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia's Drift to Revolution 1825-1917

“Again, take someone who’s crippled or deformed; they can’t be tied to the plank without a lot of sweat and heaving, and then the crowds (who can’t see much anyway) get bored and start hissing and catcalling. Meanwhile a queue builds up, and the people at the end of the queue get awkward and start screaming or passing out. If all the clients were young, male, stoical and fit, he’d have fewer problems, but it’s surprising how few of them fall into all those categories.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Paranoia is acceptable in the new friendship paradigm. Worrying that your best employees or customers might leave is ok, as long as you put in place an active strategy to offset any possibility of that scenario.”
― Kevin Kelly, DO! The Pursuit of Xceptional Execution

“Leadership is the ability to make things happen.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“Willingness to learn is important, willingness to act on what you learn is critical.”
― Kevin Kelly DO the pursuit of xcdeptional execution

“Put character and mental toughness before execution and you will get consistent execution.”
― William James Moore

“How do entrepreneurs survive their early failures? They don’t view their failures as failures - they view these experiences as feedback, and a prelude to future success.”
― Kevin Kelly DO the pursuit of xceptional execution

“Every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed.”
― Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics

“Don't tell me what you are going to do. Show me what you have done.”
― Nauman Faridi