68 Execution Quotes

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.

Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur.

An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.

Good ideas are common - what's uncommon are people who'll work hard enough to bring them about.

Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

The Supreme Court of the United States... has validated the Nazi method of execution in... concentration camps, starving them to death!

Knowledge in war is very simple, being concerned with so few subjects, and only with their final results at that. But this does not make its application easy.

What we should admire is the acute fulfillment of the unspoken assumptions, the smooth harmony of the whole activity, which only become evident in the final success.

Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.

'I think I've always had the abilities, but the object has been to perform as well as I can.'

Grip the long sword with a rather floating feeling in your thumb and forefinger, with the middle finger neither tight nor slack, and with the last two fingers tight. It is bad to have play in your hands. When you take up a sword, you must feel intent on cutting the enemy. As you cut an enemy you must not change your grip, and your hands must not 'cower'. When you dash the enemy's sword aside, or ward it off, or force it down, you must slightly change the feeling in your thumb and forefinger. Above all, you must be intent on cutting the enemy in the way you grip the sword.

It's not knowing what to do, it's doing what you know.

Cadres decide everything!

I loathe none but executioners.

Delivery, delivery, delivery.

Please report to RF SS and to the Fuehrer that all arrangements against Jews, political and concentration camp internees in the Protectorate have been taken care of by me personally today.

While Hitler claimed that only a tiny clique was responsible, the investigations conducted by Kaltenbrunner resulted in 5,000 executions, and in addition thousands of others were sent to concentration camps. Reports of the interrogations were sent almost daily by Kaltenbrunner to Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellory, who was continuously at Hitler's side.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner entered the execution chamber at 1.36 a.m., wearing a sweater beneath his blue double-breasted coat. With his lean haggard face furrowed by old duelling scars, this terrible successor to Reinhard Heydrich had a frightening look as he glanced around the room. He wet his lips apparently in nervousness as he turned to mount the gallows, but he walked steadily. This was the man, one of whose agents - a man named Rudolf Hoess - confessed at a trial that under Kaltenbrunner's orders he gassed 3 million human beings at the Auschwitz concentration camp! As the black hood was raised over his head, Kaltenbrunner, still speaking in a low voice, used a German phrase which translated means, 'Germany, good luck.'

At the time of the shooting of these 120, there was a young Jewish boy of twenty who had a Nordic appearance, with blue eyes and blond hair. Himmler called that boy aside from the pit where he was to be shot and asked him if he were Jewish, whether his grandparents were all Jewish. The boy replied that as far as he knew, his entire family was Jewish. Then Himmler said that he couldn't help the boy, and the boy was executed along with the others. You could see how Himmler tried to save the boy's life.

The parliament intended to have hanged him, and he expected no less, but resolved to be hanged with the Bible under one arm and Magna Carta under the other.

Heil Hitler! (when asked to state his name) You know my name well. Julius Streicher! The Bolsheviks will hang you one day! (to the hangman) Purim festival, 1946! I am now by God my father! Adele, my dear wife.

'To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!'

I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.

Philip Kaufman's 'Twisted' walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey.

They developed out of the situation. The courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I always objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time, Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootings, so we used gas chambers instead.

All those against the revolution must disappear and quickly be executed.

A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

Get a good idea and stay with it. Do it, and work at it until it's done right.

We must push forward now, otherwise we risk everything. Hurry yourself with the technical aspects, a lot of time has already been lost.

Badly mishandled. Nose broken at last interrogation. My time is up. Was not a traitor. Did my duty as a German. If you survive, please tell my wife...

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

A CEO need not understand deeply administrative, technical or political issues. But when it comes to implementing his vision, be it in improving services, contributing to society or improving the company's and employee's lives, he must be an uncontested leader.

I propose to give an account of the life of Giordano Bruno... who was burnt under pretence of atheism, at Rome, in the year 1600 and of his works which are perhaps the scarcest books ever printed... The most industrious historians of speculative philosophy have not been able to procure more than a few of his works... out of eleven, the titles of which are preserved to us I have had an opportunity of perusing six.

Think slow, act fast.

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

Death - by hanging! - that, at least, I did not deserve. The death part - all right, somebody has to stand for the responsibility. But that - that I did not deserve!

A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting.

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

I'm a soldier, I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight.

It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.

Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

This is one of the most highly secret matters there are, perhaps the most secret. Anybody who speaks about it is shot dead immediately. Two talkative people died yesterday.

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.

Anne and five men were put to death by due process of law because the king wished to marry again ... Henry had now so far discarded scruple that to get his way he was prepared to appear as a cuckold and a victim of witchcraft. - Sir Geoffrey Elton

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnee; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple - to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things.