Quotes About Tragedy

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.

I'll make a beautiful corpse.

A father and his son are in a terrible car crash. The father is killed instantly—but the son survives, barely, his life hanging in the balance. He's rushed to the hospital and into surgery, but there's only one doctor there, and as soon as the doctor sees the boy, the doctor says, 'I can't operate on my own son!' How could this be, if the boy's father was killed in the crash?

And when a futurist dies, the tragedy is that we lose access to all the possible futures they imagined for us. Our only connection, afterward, is through the arcane procedure like literary interpretation, like reading the flight of birds or throwing the I Ching, as Ballard must have as a child in Shanghai. Like it or not, we live in one of Ballard's futures; a little apocalyptic, bent by technology.

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.

Heaven blazing into the head:Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,And all the drop-scenes drop at onceUpon a hundred thousand stages,It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead.

All perform their tragic play,There struts Hamlet, there is Lear.

We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died?

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

Sad was the Hour, and luckless was the Day. - Eclogue the Second: Hassan; or the Camel-driver

Toll for the brave—The brave! that are no more;All sunk beneath the wave,Fast by their native shore!

civilian casualties n. collateral damage When General Bernard Rogers was asked if collateral damage meant civilian casualties, he said "Yes.

I lost my mother when I was three years old. She had some small injury – a piece of metal pierced her foot – but it went septic, and because she couldn't afford a real doctor she saw a man in the village instead. He must have made it worse. Certainly he failed to cure her. She died quite unnecessarily; at least that is what I feel.

who had surrendered and thrown themselves at the mercy of the Afghans, were to a man executed on Durrani's orders. The Peshwa Ballaji Rao died broken-hearted soon after: 'his mind

Not long after his return to England, on 22 November 1774, at the age of only forty-nine, Robert Clive committed suicide in his townhouse in Berkeley Square.

What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending

She felt him more than life to her and knew him lost, and the frenzy, that makes a woman kill the man she loves, or fling vitriol to destroy the beauty she cannot have for all hers, possessed her lawless soul.

To escape the cycle of tragedy, we (searchers) have to be tough on the ideas of the planners, even while we salute their goodwill.

Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.

The tragedy is that so many have ambition and so few have ability.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.