"It is probably the fact that capital punishment is accepted as necessary, and yet instinctively felt to be wrong, that gives so many descriptions of executions their tragic atmosphere. They are mostly written by people who have actually watched an execution and feel it to be a terrible and only partly comprehensible experience which they want to record; whereas battle literature is largely written by people who have never heard a gun go off and think of a battle as a sort of football match in which nobody gets hurt."
"EXECUTION TIME!" (Puts him or her into the electric chair) (Kills the bad user on the electric chair) Finally, (He/She) is dead! And the world is now in piece!"
— The Police officer in GoAnimate
"I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks, and language of the assembled spectators. [...] When the sun rose brightly — as it did — it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the devil."
— Charles Dickens, Letter to The Times on public executions, 14 November 1849
"Chief among the concerns of any code of punishment is that it is important for the executed to have dignity. A man's death must be treated with reverence and not treated at some soiled thing. It therefore transforms from a wrongdoing into a spectacle."
— Au Vam, Pankrator of Vesh, Kill Six Billion Demons
"I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy."
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 13 October 1660
"Anyway, there was a festival in Cerre to celebrate his execution. It was a grotesque display of the basest of human instincts, reveling in revenge."
— Zera on an Evil Sorcerer's apprentice, The Bone Maker
