Quotes About Tragedy

The great wars of the 20th Century made it into the worst Century ever.

People ask me whether I see 'Star Wars' as a comedy or a tragedy, but it's really neither - it's partly a history, like 'Henry V,' and partly a fantasy, like 'The Tempest.'

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

We often don't think of them, we think of the great wars and the great battles, but what about losing a son or a daughter, or a girl losing her husband or vice versa? I think of the people who never got the chance to have the opportunities I had.

9/11, the wars and terrorism have affected all of us in different ways: people who lost family on 9/11, the people who lost family in the wars and people who lost family in various terrorist attacks that have occurred since.

My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance.

Roman's wife Sharon Tate had been murdered by Charles Manson the year before, but Roman had been through so much leaving the Warsaw ghetto that he was very strong and private.

Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

I'd lived in Portland on and off for a decade before I'd even heard of Vanport. It was this town of 20,000 people that washed away from north Portland.

I was down in Washington when 9/11 happened. We were in the middle of putting together the next summer season, and all I could think of was something somehow must make sense to us. Our Town kept coming into my mind.

Your life is not a tragedy. It's history, and it's yours.

She was just on the verge of recapturing the feeling, how she had brought the cleaver down unflinchingly, how she had been tragic and mighty, and in that moment how her bones had chipped and shattered, but it was all done in an instant. Severed.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy.

inconceivable pain he was about to inflict on people he loved. Claire had been hurt—Layla was dead, for God's sake—because of

Sikhs in the raiding party 'shouted with delight' when Hodson murdered the princes.

Bloodlust found free play in recaptured Delhi. Wilson ordered that anyone found with a weapon should be killed, not taken prisoner. In the event, the empty-handed too were slain.

Probably between half a million and eight hundred thousand in all were killed in Punjab in 1947.

In some villages near Allahabad, British soldiers killed aged men, women and children for alleged association with the rebels. Many were simply 'burnt to death'.

Khaliquzzaman suggests that if Jinnah had responded positively to Gandhi in 1944, a peaceful separation might indeed have replaced the 1947 tragedy.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

What greater pain could mortals have than this To see their children dead before their eyes

The history of the twentieth century, he pointed out, is replete with instances of the tragedy that overtakes democracy when a leader who has risen to power on the crest of a popular wave or with the support of a democratic organisation becomes a victim of political narcissism and is egged on by a coterie of unscrupulous sycophants who use corruption and terror to silence opposition and attempt to make public opinion an echo of authority.