Quotes on Tragedy

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

Childhood hunger in America is as much a paradox as it is a tragedy. Why, in the wealthiest country in the world, should hunger darken the lives and dreams of 12 million children and their families? I believe that, when Americans learn the facts and understand how their involvement can make a difference, banishing childhood hunger will be a national, local and personal priority.

The tragedy is that the police and inner city communities should be allies. Who suffers most from violent crime in America? Inner city communities. Who has a personal and professional interest in lowering that violence? Cops.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways.

Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his tormenting tragedy is, and will be, the tragedy of the bedroom.

There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.

Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light.

Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on.

There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.

Syria has become the great tragedy of this century - a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history.

She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.

The greatest tragedy to befall a person is to have sight but lack vision.

Men and women are sacrificed to the idols of profit and consumption: it is the 'culture of waste.' If a computer breaks it is a tragedy, but poverty, the needs and dramas of so many people end up being considered normal. ... When the stock market drops 10 points in some cities, it constitutes a tragedy. Someone who dies is not news, but lowering income by 10 points is a tragedy! In this way people are thrown aside as if they were trash.

Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.