Quotes About Tragedy

First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition—a desire with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

Human tragedy, of its essence, consists in the denigration of what is in the name of what is to come

he's a maggot-eaten fool and we'll be dead because of him.

he still remembered their cries for help in God's name. But God had turned His face from those men that day, so they had perished

There is no proportion. Pearl Harbor took care of that.

Stoner learned that men killed women for lawn mowers and crockpots.

The real effect of the WTC calamity has been depressed spirits, anxiety, and uncertainty among publishers, and of course those emotions are not restricted to publishers.

My mom is from New Orleans. And all of my maternal relatives were there during Katrina. We couldn't even find my uncle for four months. We literally didn't know where he was. I had been there just four days before the storm hit.

My favorite uncle died when I was eleven, and that was two months after 9/11, so that was a particularly difficult time with my family.

We all remember where we were and we all remember what we were doing. I had a brother in New York, an uncle, lots of friends in New York. It made me angry, it made me sad; what could I do.

I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.

My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.

It's senseless. I've lost several uncles, I've lost my best friend to gun violence in New Orleans.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy. Making people laugh one moment and the next making them feel really uncomfortable.

As an actor, I always think that if someone does pick up a phone during a performance, something dire must be happening in their lives that is more important than theatre - some kind of tragedy they were attending to, or something. It's very uncomfortable if you don't know why they would pick up a phone and talk in the middle of a show.

Boxing is made for film - there is corruption, violence, tragedy and the chance that the underdog can catch the champion with one lucky punch.

Nobody should underestimate how much the world changed on the 11th of September 2001.

Rick James was a force to be reckoned with. He was an underground success here but huge in the U.S. - people used to compare him to Prince. Sadly, he had an early death.

There are moments in life we all remember, and I will never forget where I was on 7 July 2005 when the awful news came through that a series of bombs had gone off on the London Underground and on a London bus.

Tragedies such as Nevil Shute's 'On the Beach' and Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr Strangelove' are so powerful because there's an underlying assumption that this did not have to happen. It is empowering.

When tragedy strikes, feeling helpless is understandable.

I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.