Famous Last Words

Lady Astor was an irascible old soul, one who always marched to her own tune. Even her family held her at arm’s length, so when she woke up in a hospital bed to see her loved ones gathered round, she asked, “Is this my birthday, or am I dying?”

Jack Daniels, of whiskey fame, had this to say: “One last drink, please!”

The outlaw Crawford Goldsby, known as Cherokee Bill, was hauled up to the gallows and asked if he had any last words. He replied, “Hell, no. I came here to die, not to give a speech.”

When the playwright Wilson Mizner was on his deathbed, a priest was summoned. “I’m sure you want to speak with me,” said the clergyman. “Why should I talk to you? I’ve just been talking to your boss” responded Mizner.

In 1979, Florida reinstated the death penalty and John Arthur Spenkelink was the unlucky man to be the first to sit again in “Old Sparky”, Florida’s famous electric chair. He had always protested his innocence. With some bitterness he spoke his last words, “Capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment.”

Karl Marx was a bit of a grump in his last days. When his housekeeper asked if he had any last words, he replied, “Go on, get out – last words are for fools who have not yet said enough!”

The last prophecy of Nostradamus was, “Tomorrow, at sunrise, I shall no longer be here.” He was right.

It’s said that Marie Antoinette, polite to a fault, accidentally stepped on her executioner’s foot on the way to the guillotine. “Excuse me, sir” were her last words.

When the outlaw James W. Rodgers was put in front of the firing squad in Utah, he was asked if he had any last words. “Yes,” he answered, “bring me a bulletproof vest!”

And of course, who would be surprised that Groucho Marx’s last words would be, “This is no way to live!”

Lawrence Oates was a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. When it was clear that his gangrenous feet and general ill-health were clearly holding back his companions, he asked them to leave him behind, but they refused. The next night he left the shelter and stepped out into the raging blizzard. “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

Saint David, patron saint of the Welsh, gathered his followers around him as he was dying and told them, “Continue to do the little things you have seen me do.”

Some wise soul has said, ‘Let your every word be as though it were your last.”