Quote of the Day for 2016-09-29

"The grief that does not speak, Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Macbeth, act 4, scene 3 (1606)

Paul McCartney leaving the AIR Oxford Street studio shortly after the murder of John Lennon (December 9, 1980) Photograph by Paul Fievez

Quote of the Day for 2016-09-13

"It was better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent."

— Trajan (53-117 CE) Quoted by Justice Edward Douglass White in Coffin Vs. United States (March 4, 1895)

The execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas (2008) Photograph by Pat Sullivan

Quote of the Day for 2016-09-02

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come."

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Julius Caesar, act 2, scene 4 (1599)

Death and the Gravedigger by Carlos Schwabe (1895)

Quote of the Day for 2016-08-25

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."

— Howard Zinn (1922-2010) "Terrorism Over Tripoli," Failure to Quit (1993)

Shoes from the La Belle discothèque bombing in West Berlin (April 7, 1986) Photograph by Paul Langrock

Quote of the Day for 2016-08-06

"Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument, which shall endure until the sun grows cold."

— Georg Fabricius (1516-1571) in praise of Georgius Agricola in De Re Metallica (1566) as translated by Herbert and Lou Hoover (1912)

Marilyn Monroe (circa 1950) Photograph by L. J. Willinger

Quote of the Day for 2016-07-28

"Here richly, with ridiculous display, / The Politician's corpse was laid away. / While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged / I wept : for I had longed to see him hanged."

— Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) "Epitaph on the Politician Himself," The London Mercury (November 1922)

Caricature of Whig politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan by William Dent (June 4, 1788)

Quote of the Day for 2016-07-21

"The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he; His time is spent."

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Richard II, act 2, scene 1 (circa 1595)

Hope in a Prison of Despair by Evelyn De Morgan (1887)

Quote of the Day for 2016-07-07

"Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,— / Take, I give it willingly; / For, invisible to thee, / Spirits twain have crossed with me."

— Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) "The Passage," The Poems of Ludwig Uhland (1831) Translated by Sarah Austin

Charon Ferrying the Shades by Pierre Subleyras (circa 1735-1744)

Quote of the Day for 2016-06-10

"As I see it, the sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself."

— Larry Flynt (1942-    ) "Don't Execute the Man Who Paralyzed Me," The Hollywood Reporter (October 17, 2013)

Electric Chair at Sing Sing by William van der Weyde (circa 1900)

Quote of the Day for 2016-03-20

"Like any thinking person, I should like to think there was—I don't care whose or which—some God. Not out of fear: death is a lark; it's life that stings. But if there were some God, then I'd exist in his imagination, like Antigone in Sophocles'. I'd have no complications, no confusions, no waste parts or misplaced elements and then, oh, Henry, then I'd make some sense. I'd be a queen in Arcady and not an animal in chaos. How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Christmas?"

— James Goldman (1927-1998) The Lion in Winter, act 2, scene 1

Theater poster by Wiesław Grzegorczyk for a production of Antigone at the People's Theater in Krakow, Poland (1998)

Quote of the Day for 2016-03-11

"I can't die but once."

— Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) Quoted in The Freedmen's Record, March 1865

Murder in Mississippi by Normal Rockwell. Illustration for the "Southern Justice" article in Look magazine (June 29, 1965)

Quote of the Day for 2016-02-19

"Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war."

— George Santayana (1863-1952) "Tipperary," Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937)

Quote of the Day for 2015-12-11

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work…I want to achieve it through not dying."

— Woody Allen (1935-    ) Quoted by Eric Lax in On Being Funny

Death and Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen) in Love and Death (1975)

Quote of the Day for 2015-12-01

"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."

— Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) "Passages from Hawthorne's Note-Books," The Atlantic Monthly, January 1866

Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle by Arnold Böcklin (1872)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-24

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war—for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more."

— John Lennon (1940-1980) Quoted in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics

John Lennon as Pvt. Gripweed in How I Won the War (1967)