Gallows Quotes

A voice behind me asked, "Where is God? Where is He? Where can He be now?" and a voice within me answered: "Where? Here He is - He has been hanged here, on these gallows."

I suspected there would be a good-size crowd once the word got out about my hanging.

How I can reach Moscow by the shortest way, in a brief space, so that I may wreak vengeance on this great perfidy of my people, with punishments worthy of their abominable crime? Not one of them shall escape with impunity. Around my royal city, which, with their impious efforts, they planned to destroy, I will have gibbets and gallows set upon the walls and ramparts, and each and every one of them will I put to a direful death.

I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown any farther than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that saying, (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source,) that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has "made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!" Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it firmly.

The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it apears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it's a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.

The key to gallows humor is to make the joke, no matter how certain the gallows is.

Weep! There, near the edge of Sofia town / Stretches -- I saw it -- a dismal gallows / And one of your sons, Bulgaria / Hangs from it with a terrible power.

Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America.

Better to be always in a minority of one with God — branded as madman, incendiary, fanatic, heretic, infidel — frowned upon by "the powers that be," and mobbed by the populace — or consigned ignominiously to the gallows, like him whose "soul is marching on," though his "body lies moldering in the grave," or burnt to ashes at the stake like Wickliffe, or nailed to the cross like him who "gave himself for the world," — in defense of the RIGHT, than like Herod, having the shouts of a multitude crying, "It is the voice of a God, and not of a man!".

Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten.

Perhaps our Congress will be Exalted on a high Gallows

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.

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

Death by hanging. That, at least, I thought I would be spared.

… the gallows, surrounded by a witless crowd with an insatiable blood lust …

I will climb the gallows gladly and show to the world as to how bravely the revolutionaries can sacrifice themselves for the cause.

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.

'Tis ill talking of halters in the house of a man that was hanged.

Crosses and gallows - that deadly historic juxtaposition.

He puls with a long rope, that waits for anothers death.

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.

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

I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to come and witness my hanging.

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.

Brown’s execution will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.