Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

The killing of a criminal can be moral — but never its legitimation.

Christ’s crucifix shall be made an excuse for executing criminals.

It is a strange, strange fate, and now, as I stand face to face with death, I feel just as if they were going to kill a boy. For I feel like a boy — and my hands are so free from blood and my heart always so compassionate and pitiful that I cannot comprehend that anyone wants to hang me.

It seems perfectly simple and inevitable, like lying down after a long day’s work.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers.

All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime.