The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.
The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.
The big tragedy in baseball is that the amateur spirit has gone out of it to a large extent.
It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.
In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.
You use everything. You use tragedy you use everything.
Even in the face of tragedy, human beings need to find a way to laugh. It's normal. It's life.
Coal mines make the news only when they explode, collapse, kill. It's exciting! Tragedy! Fodder for a cable-news frenzy.
The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.
The film, 'Aftershock,' for me is really about how the minor problems in life that we think are so major ultimately mean nothing when a tragedy happens, when a real problem happens.
The villain in 'Call Me by Your Name' is the tragedy of love - what seems to be part of the deal you sign with someone when you experience an amazing time with them.
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.
Gangster movies are the inheritor of the Greek tragedy: it's the only genre where the audience will be disappointed if there's not a tragic ending.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.
Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes.
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
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.
But, in addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections.
Life is neither comedy or tragedy, life is what you make of it.
Apart altogether from our own vital interests, we cannot and must not desert those other nations who have already gone through so much tragedy and suffering to defeat the evil designs of the Axis powers.
In all love stories the theme is love and tragedy, so by writing these types of stories, I have to include tragedy.
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.
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
It's the great tragedy - people employed in ways that don't fully tap everything they do best in life.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?
The Iraqi people are living a long-running tragedy because of the legacy of the old regime, the Americans and their actions that are unsuitable for Iraqi society, and the weakness of national resolve.
Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
