Quotes About Tragedy

The weapon of suicide bombing is so desperate that you aren't even left with the possibility of taking revenge or punishing anyone; the terrorist is killed along with his victims, his blood mixing with theirs.

It's not a radical statement: all of us should agree that we want to make sure that weapons stay out of the hands of people that could use them to hurt others, especially after the tragedies we've seen in Charleston, Newtown, Wilkinsburg and too many other communities.

We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that '9/11'? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.

My positions on gun safety have remained consistent over the years, and have been on my website for years. Whether I'm in a tough re-election race, an easy re-election race, or if it isn't an election year, whether there's a high-profile tragedy in the news or otherwise, my position remains unchanged and on my website.

I learned hard lessons in life; I had to because I had so much happen: My mother died my sophomore year in high school. The next year, same day, my brother dropped dead. Two years after that, I got married because my girlfriend got pregnant. The year after my wedding, my father - who I had only recently met - died.

As I stood and gave the eulogy for young Michael Brown last week, I kept thinking about the fact that this child should have been in college instead of laying in a coffin.

I've still got a scrapbook at home of the Munich air crash. I was an Arsenal supporter, and I went with my dad every week. I would have been 11 in 1958 and remember standing at Highbury for the Busby Babes. I remember that was the last game before they jetted off to Europe, and a lot of them never came back.

One of my friends went on a murder weekend... now he is doing life for it.

I was 22 years old when I met Robert Johnson. I was there the night he was poisoned.

Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.

It's hard for me not to have a great deal of compassion for the last Romanov family because, really, I don't know if a politically savvy ruler would have been able to make the situation turn out much differently.

Only in a popular war against France... do I see a misfortune.

As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached 'The Aeneid' just as I would a contemporary poem or novel - and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.

'Wuthering Heights' is portrayed as a great romantic novel, and when I read it again, I thought, 'How is this romantic? All these people are horrible to each other!'

The cholera had broken out at the post, and five or six men were dying daily.

We've lost our city. I fear it's potentially like Pompeii.

My mom got shot. My dad got shot. Some of the craziest stuff. All that happened to me.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. made me very, very sad, and I mourned and I cried like many of our citizens did.

I like laughing about cruel things because life is cruel.

The mad, cruel, and accursed American war.

I think we should be encouraged to learn from Columbine and let it be a battle cry for all of us.

The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.

I always do drama. It's just that some people laugh at it and some people cry.

I lost my father four years ago to what was the culmination of a manic episode that seemingly, to my family, came completely out of the blue after 59 years on this earth with no issues that we knew about, at least - sort of a normal run-of-the-mill guy who did his job and came home and had a family.