Gallows Quotes

“Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.”
― William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

“The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.”
― Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man

“I swing like a pendulum between
the darkness and the light,
sometimes it feels like gallows
other times it feels like flight.”
― Collette O'Mahony, The Soul in Words: A collection of Poetry & Verse

“Hark to the clinking of the hammers! Hark to the driving of the nails! What fun to build a gallows, the cure for all that ails!”
― Ransom Riggs

“When the condemned man saw the gallows, he knew the hypocrisy of life was over and that lies would serve him no more. He mumbled some defeated truths and left this world. The spectators were aghast and fascinated as the body swung and was still. They went about their business.”
― Stewart Stafford

“When state and government have gone, laws must go. People who speak of 'laws' in a communistic society, think perhaps only of those general rules of sensible and noble conduct which every good man finds it easy to observe. But in that case they use a wrong word. A law is a rule connected with an apparatus to compel obedience. Behind the law stand the court, the sheriff, the police, the hangman, etc., and who wants them? None, we guess.”
― Johann Joseph Most, The Social Monster: A Paper On Communism And Anarchism