for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

I guess God has the last laugh. From up on high he lets us kill. And his people die for their faith. And we call it triumph of the will.

Let me tell you something. This is my playpen, and I get the last word.

"Messieurs, c'est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot." (Gentlemen, it is the microbes who will have the last word.)

NO MAN KNOWS the hour of his ending, nor can he choose the place or the manner of his going. To each it is given to die proudly, to die well, and this is, indeed, the final measure of the man.

If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

His last words were spoken to a woman, to the nurse who was holding his hand. Perhaps we all have the last words ready when we go into the last room. Perhaps the thing about last words is not how good they are, but whether we can get them out. What Larkin said faintly was, "I'm going to the inevitable."

A man who comes to be hanged,' pursued Jasper, impartially, 'has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.' 'In

I thought I might now have an opportunity to speak my last words to a multitude, which I thought would come to see me die; and, thought I, if it must be so, if God will but convert one soul by my very last words, I shall not count my life thrown away, nor lost.

For he who has the audacity to determine who should live and who should die no longer serves the law but dictates the law.

The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.

He who laughs last may be the joke.