Gallows Quotes

• Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.

  Cardinal Richelieu

  Giving, Alive, Lines

  45 Copy quote

• If you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.

  Robert Jordan

  Smile, Giving, Coins

  Robert Jordan (2010). “The Fires of Heaven: Book Five of 'The Wheel of Time'”, p.577, Macmillan

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• Once you have the gallows, you'll find new reasons to hang people from it.

  Orson Scott Card

  People, Reason

  Orson Scott Card (2010). “Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker”, p.133, Macmillan

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• You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the Grim Reaper.

  Robert Alton Harris

  Inspirational, Dance, Kings

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• I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe?

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Humor, Men, Doors

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• If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows.

  Richard Brautigan

  Technology, World, Neurosis

  1970 The Abortion: An Historical Romance.

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• Perhaps our Congress will be Exalted on a high Gallows.

  Abraham Clark

  Congress, Exalted

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• A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

  James Wolcott

  Dark, Night, Clouds

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• A member of Parliament to Disraeli: 'Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.' That depends, Sir,' said Disraeli, 'whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Mistress, Disease, Embrace

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• You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.

  Charles Dickens

  Love, Mean, Men

  Charles Dickens, George Cruikshank (1868). “The Works of Charles Dickens: Our mutual friend”, p.345

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• On the gallows tree, all men are brothers.

  George R. R. Martin

  Brother, Men, Tree

  George R. R. Martin (2012). “George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones 5-Book Boxed Set (Song of Ice and Fire Series): A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and and A Dance with Dragons”, p.2912, Bantam

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• The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.

  Paul Gauguin

  Stupid, Struggle, Men

  Paul Gauguin (1985). “The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin”, p.93, Routledge

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• I made my own house be my gallows.

  Dante Alighieri

  House, Made, My Own

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• In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

  Edmund Burke

  Prejudice, Grove, Ends

  'Reflections on the Revolution in France' (1790) p. 115.

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• When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

  Charles Lamb

  Children, Pride, People

  Charles Lamb (1869). “The Essays of Elia and Eliana”, p.133

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• They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

  Nellie Bly

  Would Be, Faults, Prison

  Nellie Bly (2016). “Ten Days in a Mad-House”, p.44, Nellie Bly

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• As to my Title, I know not yet whether it will be honourable or dishonourable, the issue of the War must Settle it. Perhaps our Congress will be Exalted on a high Gallows.

  Abraham Clark

  War, Aggravation, Issues

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• If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

  Paul Eldridge

  Self Esteem, Trials, Crime

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• I would rather die upon yonder gallows, than live in slavery.

  Samuel Sharpe

  Slavery, Dies

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• It isn't the desire to abide by the law that makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.

  Paulo Coelho

  Law, Punishment, Desire

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• The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

  Sigmund Freud

  Reality, Ego, Suffering

  58 Copy quote

• Morality for the upper classes, the gallows for the rabbles.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Class, Upper Class, Morality

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• He who makes war his profession cannot be otherwise than vicious. War makes thieves, and peace brings them to the gallows.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  War, Thieves, Vicious

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• Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.

  Mark Twain

  Cutting, Thinking, Long Ago

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• Swaraj is not meant for cowards, but for those who would mount smilingly to the gallows and refuse even to allow their eyes to be bandaged.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Eye, Coward, Refuse

  Mahatma Gandhi, Anand T. Hingorani, Ganga Anand Hingorani (1985). “The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts”

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