Performs Public Executions

Famous quotes containing the words performs, public and/or executions:

    The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.
    Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)

    [Asserting] important First Amendment rights ... why should [executions] be the one area that is conducted behind closed doors?... Why shouldn’t executions be public?
    Phil Donahue (b. 1935)