Electric Chair Quotes

Before we snap to judge someone who's done a horrible crime, is it possible that all of us in the worst possible circumstances could be capable of something like that? So it's about not judging people before really considering what the circumstance was and that not all murderers are created equal. We have a tendency in our society to just say murder? Cut and dried. Go away forever. Or maybe you should have the electric chair yourself. ~ Jack Black

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince's writing style(s) during the course of the album's recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of 'Electric Chair' among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that "he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn't really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious - it's like something you'd do if you had no access to any equipment. He'd use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he'd record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song - and most likely, he'd have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he'd do his one man band approach to recording a song. He'd know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the 'click track' - the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo - he'd then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He'd build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there's your demo. ~ Jake Brown

In Sing Sing Prison, in a ghastly white room stands a chair. Its parts are heavy joinings of oak, riveted and screwed together; its strong legs fastened to the floor with teeth and claws of steel. It bites into the marrow of men with fangs of fire. For this is the faldstool of bloody human justice, the prayer-chair of man's vengeance upon man. Into it are strapped ... men who have killed other men. In it, for a high moral purpose, erring human lives are shocked across the barrier into night and the grave. - Edward H. Smith (1918) ~ Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said Tennessee is the first state to reintroduce the electric chair without giving prisoners an option. ~ Anonymous

We talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn't. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.
We got drunk. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

On March 1, 1907, New Jersey passed a law authorizing execution by electrocution, thus becoming only the third state in the nation to adopt electrocution as its form of capital punishment. Until that time, most states hanged condemned prisoners. Carl Adams, the founder of Adams Electric in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, built this electric chair, known as "Old Sparkey. ~ Mark W. Falzini

She has an electric blender, electric toaster and electric bread maker. She said "There are too many gadgets and no place to sit down!" So I bought her an electric chair. ~ Red Skelton

Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition. ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo

The painting did not exist until I made it,' Karabekian went on. 'Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

'I now give you my world of honor,' he went on, 'that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

'I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Sheperdstown. Very well - let a five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old ca ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? 'French Fries!'"
Convicted murderer James French to members of the press who were witnesses at his execution by the State of Oklahoma in the electric chair in 1966. ~ James French

The Death House back then was a self-contained unit, with its own hospital, kitchen, exercise yard and visiting room. The cells were inadequate, dark, and did not have proper sanitary facilities or ventilation. One window and skylight furnished the ventilation and light of the entire unit. Twelve cells were on the lower tier, six on each side, facing each other, with a narrow corridor between them. Five cells were located in an upper tier. There was an area the prisoners called the Dance Hall that housed a prisoner to be executed on his last day. The narrow corridor connected the Dance Hall to the execution room, where the Electric Chair resided. The prisoners named this corridor the Last Mile or the Green Mile, because this was the last walk a prisoner would take all the way to the small green riveted door at the end of the corridor, on his way to the execution room. ~ Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

My uncle's dying wish - he wanted me on his lap. He was in the electric chair. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

To talk of atomic energy in terms of atomic bombs is like talking of electricity in terms of the electric chair. ~ Pyotr Kapitsa

You know who doesn't get the death penalty? Crazy people. That's a defense in America. My client's crazy. He doesn't know what he did. Fine, then he doesn't know we're gonna kill him. If a guy's that retard, you put him the electric chair and tell him it's a ride. ~ Bobby Slayton

And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all. ~ Henry Miller

But let us say he was (guilty). Let us for a moment say he was (guilty). What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this. ~ Ernest Gaines

I expect you (William Whitelaw) were as impressed as I was to read of the recent electrocution in Florida of a character called John Spenkelink in the electric chair. It seems that a full six minutes passed before Spenkelink was dead, during which time he hopped about like a prawn on a hot plate. ~ William Donaldson

What a thrill that will be if I have to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme thrill. The only one I haven't tried. ~ Albert Fish

Capital punishment, that thing scares me, it really does. I was talking to my friend about the electric chair, and he starts freakin' out. He's like 'the electric chair? That's too good for these people. That's too good for them'. Alright, how do we make the electric chair worse? How about this? They have to pedal a car battery to their own head. Is that ok? Is that enough, Mr. Hitler? ~ Dave Attell

Now the Tombs, like the name says, are so horrible that they had to close it down. Today it doesn't exist and people go in the electric chair and all that. ~ Gregory Corso

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair-
hanging like an oasis on his air
of lost connections ... ~ Robert Lowell

Mom always said I was born to sit in the electric chair, but I'm proving her wrong. I'm going to die on my knees, begging for my life. ~ Bauvard

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.
He was. He was going to shake hands with death.
He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.
("3 Kills For 1") ~ Cornell Woolrich

I never staged a coup. They picked me up. Like I say, they forced me to become premier, maybe hoping that by that way, they send me to the electric chair. ~ Nguyen Cao Ky

The physiological effects of an electrocution are severe and painful. Besides launching the body into violent convulsions, the electrocution of a human being causes massive destruction throughout the body. ~ Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

You'd be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background color matches the drapes. ~ Andy Warhol

There's a way to do an acid trip like Harold & Kumar, and there's a way to be on acid. What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that (electric) chair in Dead Man Walking. These are the guys that I look up to. ~ Shia Labeouf

Remember how I found you there alone in your electric chair, I told you dirty jokes until you smiled. ~ Billy Joel

(You wouldn't believe how many people will hang up a picture of an electric chair? especially if it matches the color of their curtains. ~ Andy Warhol

In the Seventies, a lot of executions via electric chair failed because of technical problems. Seed tells the true story of someone who survived and sought revenge. They buried him alive to make it seem he was dead. ~ Uwe Boll

I've come out many times publicly in support of the death penalty. I've stated that I'd be more than willing personally to pull the switch on some of the monsters I've hunted in my career with the FBI. But Bruno Hauptmann just doesn't fit into this category -- the evidence just wasn't, and isn't, there to have confidently sent him to the electric chair. To impose the one sentence for which there is no retroactive correction requires a far higher standard of proof than was seen here. Blaming him for the entire crime was, to my mind, an expedient and simpleminded solution to a private horror that had become a national obsession. ~ John E. Douglas

If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair, and a five percent chance for escape which are you going to vote for? The electric chair, because youre likely to win? ~ Michael Badnarik

Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I'd read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people - usually lodgers and members of their own families - and who were then murdered in turn: by handing, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were depicted with their victims in awkward social situations - seated about a dinner table, perhaps, as their poisoned family members expired. The plaques that explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold the bodies to anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what anatomy was. I knew only that anatomy made people kill their children. ~ Neil Gaiman

Have you noticed how the Republicans and Democrats try to copy each other at their conventions. Like at the Democratic convention John Kerry's daughter told a story about how he once gave CPR to her hamster. At the Republican convention the Bush girls are going to tell a story about how when their hamster was bad, their dad built them a little electric chair. ~ Jay Leno

My kid wants to be a prison warden when he grows up so he can put thumb tacks on the electric chairs. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

It's absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may - may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it's clear that - that the death penalty, in and of itself, is not considered cruel and unusual punishment. ~ Antonin Scalia

We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn't. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

With a kind of perverse obstinancy his father refused to take off his official uniform even in the house; and while his robe hung uselessly on the clothes hook, his father dozed, completely dressed, in his chair, as if he were always ready for duty and were waiting even here for the voice of his superior. ~ Franz Kafka

This leather chair belongs to me. I would let you sit in it, but you can't sit in an idea. ~ Jarod Kintz

A few months ago, I was sitting morosely at my desk, wondering why I had ever agreed to review Barbara Bush: A Memoir for an English newspaper. The experience was proving to be a degradation of the act of reading. Imagine, if you will, being strapped into a chair and made to listen to Liberace playing the piano for hour upon hour. Or imagine being fed chocolate dinner mints, like a hapless goose, until you are on the verge of explosion. Such was my lot. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Because I am special.

For the moment that was all she had to say. There would be more, much more, but the four words were like four candles, or the arms of the Crusaders' cross she wore on her sleeve.

Because I am special.

She shut the book and began to blow out the candle, before changing her mind. She sat back in her chair, and watched it glow. ~ Debbie Viguie

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became ~ Bill Bryson

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction. ~ Marshall McLuhan

We're not handling things anymore before they arrive on our doorstep. I like to feel how thin porcelain can be, run my hand over a textile, see if I want to sit in a chair. ~ Nate Berkus

Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish rivers or piloting their own Learjets into Helsinki. Mr. Hosokawa was photographed at home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12 stereo system behind him. ~ Ann Patchett

To wheel about in one's chair to address the footman would be completely outside the pale. ~ Sheri Cobb South

If a seminary or Christian college has a wise provost or dean or department chair, he or she will realize that they need some faculty who are master teachers but publish little, and some scholars who can both teach and publish, and some who would be better just being research professors. It takes a variety of faculty to make up a good school. But alas, even in schools that have such administrators, promotion and sabbaticals are often based on publications or planned publications, not just on reviews of one's classroom performances. Thus, some scholars who find research and writing a huge cross to bear are forced to carry that cross all the way to Golgotha Publishing House in order to get promoted. It really ought not to be that way at a Christian school, where the main goal should be training students or budding clergy in the way that they should go. ~ Ben Witherington III

Camus believes that in rejecting hope, rather than despair, the individual becomes that much closer to being free. It's in the acceptance of the futility of our actions online, even though they may provide both cause (validation, recognition) and value (enriching life via apps, etc.) there will be no change. Activity will continue. Inevitably, our relevancy or level of activity will falter, and eventually change. Camus uses the inevitability of death as cause and reason to eliminate hope. To eliminate hope lets the individual experience fully, without reservation and restriction, the life at hand. I could say the same about our modern condition. ~ Michael J. Seidlinger

A ball, at last! Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott sank back into her chair in delight. ~ Gail Carriger

As a co-chair of the State's 2010 Olympics Task Force, I am working to make sure our border crossings are ready to handle the risks and benefits the Games will bring. ~ Rick Larsen

I grew up in such a musical family, and my dad was the first chair in the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, and my mom was a piano teacher and a painter, so it was kind of a creative environment, and it was kind of in my DNA. ~ Trevor Rabin

He leans back in his chair, the brown of his T-shirt complementary against the dark wood. ~ Anyta Sunday

Remote Viewing is Space Shifting without leaving your chair. It is a convenient shortcut to a miracle, therefore, relatively high numbers of humans were able to achieve it. ~ Lada Ray

Pyscho,' Flynt says, pounding a fist hard into his chair. 'Ouch ~ Kate Ellison

They rode for a while in silence, a tiny island in the smoky stream of marching men. Then Lee said slowly, in a strange, soft, slow tone of voice, "Soldiering has one great trap."
Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice. "To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is...a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men."
Lee rarely lectured. Longstreet sensed a message beyond it. He waited. Lee said, "We don't fear our own deaths, you and I." He smiled slightly, then glanced away. "We protect ourselves out of military necessity, not do not protect yourself enough and must give thought to it. I need you. But the point is, we are afraid to die. We are prepared for our own deaths, and for the deaths of comrades. We learn that at the Point. But I have seen this happen: we are not prepared for as many deaths as we have to face, inevitably as the war goes on. There comes a time..."
He paused. He had been gazing straight ahead, away from Longstreet. Now, black-eyed, he turned back, glanced once quickly into Longstreet's eyes, then looked away.
"We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is. We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to d ~ Michael Shaara

They weren't people that liked change. They were the kind of people that would have tied change to a chair with dental floss if they could in order to avoid it. They were the type of people who desired to live in their virtual bubbles and grew to resent anyone that challenged that world. ~ Anna M. Aquino

There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you're trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society. ~ Colm Keaveney

And the people ... there is no end of them. I sit on that damnable iron chair and listen to them complain until my mind is numb and my ass is raw. They all want something, money or land or justice. The lies they tell ... ~ George R R Martin

The white saucer like some full moon descends
At last from the clouds of the table above;
She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows,
Transfigured with love.
She nestles over the shining rim,
Buries her chin in the creamy sea;
Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw
Is doubled under each bending knee.
A long, dim ecstasy holds her life;
Her world is an infinite shapeless white,
Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop,
Then she sinks back into the night,
Draws and dips her body to heap
Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair,
Lies defeated and buried deep
Three or four hours unconscious there. ~ Harold Monro

Instantly Pandora nudged her chair with the back of her leg, toppling it over. "Blast," she exclaimed. "How did that happen?"
The countess turned to face her. "Pandora, that word!"
"What should I say when I knock something over?"
There was a brief silence as Lady Berwick considered the question. "You may say 'alas.'"
"'Alas?' Pandora echoed in distaste. "But that's such a flabby word."
"What does it even mean?" Cassandra asked. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The first book I ever read that made me cry. I was seven and hadn't realized books could do that. Just finish you like that. I was sitting in a beanbag chair in the school library when the book ended, weeping, looking at all the books on the shelves all around me, and I decided then and there that I never wanted to be anywhere else. ~ Mary Ann Rivers

We did it," he muttered to Ekaterin, now perching on the chair arm. "Why didn't anybody stop us? Why aren't there more regulations about this sort of thing? What fool in their right mind would put me in charge of a baby? Two babies? ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

The Music was like Electric Sugar ~ Tom Waits

I didn't ask why anybody would want to risk the electric two-step on the tracks because, as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or later. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

A thousand electric cars could run on how you feel when you know that the person you like likes you back. It feels incredible. Like it shouldn't be possible. Of all the happy coincidences to ever exist, it's one of the happiest. ~ Emma Mills

Some people work to have a weekend and so on the weekend they genuinely don't think about anything apart from the fact that they're on their weekend. Some people are like that so maybe some people would be like, "Yeah that'd be great. Take away my anxiety and give me a nice lounge chair." But I would be so not interested in that. ~ Kristen Stewart

A woman's place is in the kitchen ... sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Try not to laugh. To the girl with golden hair and beauty with no compare. Wait for me at midnight. Sit at your window, in your lovely pink chair and wait, my sweet. I'll find you there. C ~ J.B. Hartnett