Quotes About Tragedy

But to see the ovens into which humans were fed was enough to implicate the high culture of Europe; its value was drawn into question once it was suspected that such a culture had culminated in Dachau and Auschwitz. (Page 451)

No one would deny that all wars and battles are regrettable acts of human folly, causing unjustifiable agony and distress to combatants and non-combatants alike-but these considerations should not preclude their serious study, if only to avoid the mistakes of the past which make such tragedies inevitable.

This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.

Si potrebbe anche dire che una delle tragedie dell'esistenza umana è il fatto che la violenza è una forma di stupidità alla quale è molto difficile replicare con una risposta intelligente.

For him, the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold...

Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.

I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.

Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

Tragedy occurred outside normal time, everyday convention. It possessed a bewildering ability to fade and grow brighter simultaneously.

Sometimes in the most tragic situation, something just profoundly funny happens.

So what is going on? For the men and women separately, the crew had a higher survival rate than the third-class passengers. But overall the crew had a lower survival rate than the third-class passengers. This is not a trick—the numbers are what they are.

If one is inflexible and devoted to an illusion of normalcy - stability, permanence, reality - then the break is always harsher. The more rules there are to violate, the more violations there will be, because what we call reality is an interpretative construct of the human mind; a reality we re-make every day to deny the howling nothingness of existence and the meaningless tragedy of life.

wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. Lose your child and you're… nothing. —Tennessee Williams

I'd used people's stories and their lives to bolster my political arguments for changing welfare. Now, however, I was running into the people themselves, and I realized that using anyone's tragedy for political gain was cowardly.

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." (Euripides)

Kelly's mother was a bitch and her father was run over by the motor home when he chased a squirrel into the street, but I figured that was more information than my mother needed to know.

La relación entre Edward y yo fue una historia típica que, atrapada en la guerra, se volvió trágica...pero eso también es una historia típica

disaster, a word that comes from the French des astres, or "from the stars.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

Tragically, we live in a day when offense to God doesn't matter nearly as much as offense to others.

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.