Guillotine Quotes

“There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”
― Wodehouse

“You would more probably have gone to the guillotine,' replied Sir Tristram, depressingly matter of fact.

'Yes, that is quite true,' agreed Eustacie. 'We used to talk of it, my cousin Henriette and I. We made up our minds we should be entirely brave, not crying, of course, but perhaps a little pale, in a proud way. Henriette wished to go to the guillotine en grande tenue, but that was only because she had a court dress of yellow satin which she thought became her much better than it did really. For me, I think one should wear white to the guillotine if one is quite young, and not carry anything except perhaps a handkerchief. Do you not agree?'

'I don't think it signifies what you wear if you are on your way to the scaffold,' replied Sir Tristram, quite unappreciative of the picture his cousin was dwelling on with such evident admiration.

She looked at him in surprise. 'Don't you? But consider! You would be very sorry for a young girl in a tumbril, dressed all in white, pale, but quite unafraid, and not attending to the canaille at all, but--'

'I should be very sorry for anyone in a tumbril, whatever their age or sex or apparel,' interrupted Sir Tristram.

'You would be more sorry for a young girl--all alone, and perhaps bound,' said Eustacie positively.

'You wouldn't be all alone. There would be a great many other people in the tumbril with you,' said Sir Tristram.

Eustacie eyed him with considerable displeasure. 'In my tumbril there would not have been a great many other people,' she said.”
― Georgette Heyer, The Talisman Ring

“But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts

Its click

Creates perpetual motion

("The Head")”
― Blaise Cendrars, Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques de Blaise Cendrars: Edition critique et commentée

“They call me a tyrant . . . One arrives at a tyrant's throne by the help of scoundrels . . . What faction do I belong to? You yourselves. What is that faction which, since the Revolution began, has crushed the factions and swept away hireling traitors? It is you, it is the people, it is the principles of the Revolution. . . .

[trans. G. Rudé, ellipses sic; Last Speech to the Convention (July 26, 1794)].”
― Maximilien de Robespierre, Robespierre

“Peut être que j'avais besoin de lui pour me montrer que même les anges n'échappent pas à la guillotine.”
― Malak El Halabi

“March 20th. It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man's head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew!”
― Guy de Maupassant, 88 More Stories

“She had hair the colour of' blackmail, a spine as straight as a guillotine, and a face that could sink ships.”
― Marie Phillips, Gods Behaving Badly

“If you press your ear to the turf that is stolen
You can hear the sound of limitations exploding
Please sir, may we have another portion?
We're children of the beast that dodged the abortion
Neck placed firm 'tween the floor and the Florsheim
We'll shut your shit down, don't call it extortion
Caution -- we're coming for your head
So call the Feds and get files to shred
Every textbook read said bring you the bread
But guess what we got you instead?

We got the guillotine, we got the guillotine”
― Boots Riley, Sorry To Bother You

“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

“Buzz crouched between her feet and scrutinised as much as he could see of her perilous interior to find out if all was in order and there were no concealed fangs or guillotines inside her to ruin him.”
― Angela Carter, Love

“Sometimes a revolution turns into an actual government, or at the very least an actual way of life that contrasts with days past like blood on snow. Such was the case in France, where even as the guillotine released a steady river of gore, Royalist insurrections were suppressed by what had become a sophisticated military.

In Toulon, the Royalist insurrection in 1793 led to an actual siege by republicans, spearheaded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. The Royalists in Toulon, supported by the British and Spanish, were feared by the republicans as an existential threat to every hope and promise of the revolution. For months there were bombardments, cannon fire that made the windows in the prison tremble.”
― Kelsey Brickl, Wolves and Urchins: The Early Life of Inspector Javert

“One girl to send her to the guillotine, one to cut the rope, and one to eagerly await the result.”
― Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4

“At elegant dinners," wrote the French historian Imbert de Saint-Armand a hundred years later in MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY (1891), "a little guillotine is brought in with the dessert and takes the place of a sweet dish. A pretty woman places a doll representing some political adversary under the knife; it is decapitated in the neatest possible style, and out of it runs something red that smells good, a liqueur perfumed with ambergris, into which every lady hastens to dip her lace handkerchief. French gaiety would make a vaudeville out of the day of judgement.”
― Christopher Kemp, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris

“The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping-knife.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Praying mantis cuts off the male's head. Guillotine: the erection of crowds. (Mante religieuse coupe la tête du mâle. Guillotine: l'érection des foules)”
― Charles de Leusse

“The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March Of Folly: From Troy To Vietnam