Here are the ingredients of a tragedy: untreated mental illness, a society where life is cheap and crime is glamorized, and a ready supply of firearms.
It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.
It’s ironic that when you go through a tragedy, you appreciate more. You realize how fragile life is and that there are so many things to still be thankful for.
I am always aware that I’ve had a special and privileged life, yet it has been balanced by tragedy as it has been for so many others.
I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it’s a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.
It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach.
What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.
Roman Polanski is a man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world. What happened to him on his incredible path is filled with tragedy, and most men would have collapsed. Instead, he became a great artist and continues to make great films.
Things happen to everybody in the course of a lifetime. Relationships end, people die, tragedy befalls everyone. So everyone has this wealth of experience, and the older you are the more you have to draw on.
Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.
Public crowdfunding still suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem. Everyone will want the benefit of the crowdfunded efforts but is incentivized to sit on the sidelines and hope others chip in.
Clearly, the oil spill in the Gulf is a terrible tragedy; we lost 11 lives on the rig, and their families are suffering, and it’s also an economic tragedy for our state and ecological tragedy for the Gulf. But Sept. 11 was a different type of event: it was an intentional attack on soil.
I trained in Shakespeare, and that’s all comedy, even when it’s tragedy.
When tragedy strikes, or even when it looms, our families will have the opportunity to look into our hearts to see whether we know what we said we knew. Our children will watch, feel the Spirit confirm that we lived as we preached, remember that confirmation, and pass the story across the generations.
Tragedy struck the family when I was 10 days old. My eldest brother was killed in a car accident. He was six. My grandmother survived the incident, but the loss devastated my parents. I think they went into shock for a couple of years.
I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.
It isn’t fate but fecklessness that has shoved Sarah Palin to the sidelines of national politics. The real tragedy is that she’s taken a lot of other serious Republican women with her.
Poor decision making in government; the tragedy of short-term economic thinking; our national housing crisis: these are real 21st Century problems for our country. They are problems that can only be solved by genuinely fearless thinking about our natural environment.
But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.
I was mad until I was about 25. Completely out of control with my emotions. Everything that happened to me was a tragedy. I’ve been much happier over 25.
Being made redundant is a personal tragedy.
It is a tragedy when you pay to make a public broadcaster survive.
For a comedienne, you have to have a little tragedy or a dark side, just not too much. Otherwise it’s too disruptive.
It got to the point the last time, at Texas, where every loss was a tragedy and every win was exhaling.
The thing that I’ve always believed is that you have to follow your passion, and if climbing is your calling in life and your craft, to not do it is a tragedy. I am always going to encourage my children to follow their passions and dreams, whatever they are.
You go down to Skid Row and you see literally hundreds of people and not just men, but women and children as well. It’s really a tragedy that our society has come to that.
I think you figure out how to be funny by necessity. It’s not a natural thing, being funny in the face of tragedy is kind of demented.
Trump, like any good Stalinist, knows that one death is a tragedy but 100,000 is a statistic.
I shall never accept that the law can be used to justify tragedy, to keep things as they are, to make us abandon our ideas of a different world. Law is the path of liberty, and must as such open the way to progress for everyone.
In all love stories the theme is love and tragedy, so by writing these types of stories, I have to include tragedy.
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
We’re all capable of being more than we presently are, and the effort that it takes and the will that it takes and sometimes the trauma and tragedy that it takes to force us into that kind of growth is the story of our lives.
The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.
In writing a little tragedy, ‘The Gaol Gate,’ I made the scenario in three lines, ‘He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.’ I wrote that play very quickly.
Modern slavery is a barbaric crime. Each and every case is a both a tragedy and an affront to our values of decency and kindness.
I’m sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I’ve never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.
Reduced… to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
It’s about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.
Generally speaking, cancer – not that funny of a thing. When you hear about it, you don’t go, ‘Oh, hilarious!’… But within that – comedy, tragedy, hand-in-hand.
The tragedy is that the police and inner city communities should be allies. Who suffers most from violent crime in America? Inner city communities. Who has a personal and professional interest in lowering that violence? Cops.
In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it’s a way of experiencing the person that you’ve lost again.
I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void: the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning.
You can’t tell the story of the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Bernie Madoff because there are thousands of stories. What you can do is to start inside, and that’s the picture that you do, which becomes like a Greek tragedy in that regard – that whole collapse.
Our everyday lives exist with comedy and tragedy next to each other.
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.’
I don’t understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?
When the systems we expect to help us actually hurt us, we have tragedy.
War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It’s the failure of diplomacy. ‘War and Peace,’ ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
Your experiences are what made you what you are today. So when tragedy happens in people’s lives, and things are left unsaid, it can be very unsettling. The lack of closure can linger.
Some of the best comedy comes from squeezing humour from tragedy and struggle, but the main pursuit of comedy should be laughter.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy, but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy.
The way that I live is in between the dual experiences of the tragedy mask and the comedy mask. I feel that I write best and think best in between those two masks.
Comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. A talent in one area might also lead to a predisposition in the other.
