Quotes About Tragedy

Los que fueron masacrados huyeron a su manera. Huyeron hacia algo que había mas allá; el cielo o en el peor de los casos la oscuridad eterna. Ellos fueron los afortunados porque los que quedan atrás están en el infierno.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, Thank God, I'm still alive. But of course, those who died-their lives will never be the same again. -Barbara Boxer, representative from California

This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.

in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned in human shit.

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)

Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence. The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune maybe no one's fault.

Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend.

three-quarters of all the deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments, which Rummel calls the dekamegamurderers: the Soviet Union with 62 million, the People's Republic of China with 35 million, Nazi Germany with 21 million, and 1928–49 nationalist China with 10 million.

Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes

And with an average trial length at the time of eight and a half minutes, it is certain that many of the people sent to the gallows were innocent.67 Rummel estimates that between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

It's not just the salience of a horrific event that stokes the terror. Our emotions are far more engaged when the cause of a tragedy is malevolent intent rather than accidental misfortune.

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what's rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).17

One victim lives in tragedy, another victim stops to stare, and still another walks on by pretending not to see

Young lovers are always doomed.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

If there is any possible consolation in the tragedy of losing someone we love very much, it's the necessary hope that perhaps it was for the best.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.

I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.

It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.

It's a great tragedy when the Bible is interpreted by those who are not in love.

Be patient, Ophelia. Love, Hamlet

I loved the Romeo and Juliet of the whole thing; this forbidden love between these two characters.