Tragic Quotes - Page 18

• To assume you know someone well enough that you can and do predict their behavior and mental perspective is a gross and often tragic mistake, for it eliminates that person's freedom to create his or her own opinion and drastically affects the emerging picture of the relationship.

  Meredith L. Young-Sowers

  Mistake, Perspective, Understanding

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• Lawyers, before any other group, must continue to point out how the system is really working-how it actually affects real people. They must constantly demonstrate to courts and legislatures alike the tragic results of legal nonintervention. They must highlight how legal doctrines no longer bear any relation to reality, whether in landlord and tenant law, holder in due course law, or any other law. In sum, lawyers must bring real morality into the legal consciousness

  William J. Brennan

  Real, Law, People

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• Dogs have fleas; people have each other. We are born to die. Life is a continuing tragic comedy. Everything and everyone we love suffers. Anybody who doesn't see that has not grown up and known life.

  Frederick Lenz

  Dog, People, Suffering

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• It is said that the American vocabulary has declined by half in the past few decades. It's a tragic instance of desertification following upon monocultural commodity production, the clear-cutting of written and spoken English.

  Stephanie Mills

  Cutting, Past, Vocabulary

  Stephanie Mills (2003). “Epicurean Simplicity”, p.130, Island Press

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• Watergate is a sad and tragic incident in our history. They were wrong, dead wrong, those men at Watergate. Men abused power, but the system still works. Men abused money, but the system still works. Men lied and perjured themselves, but the system still .

  John Wayne

  Men, Lied, Incidents

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• The comic, more than the tragic, because it ignites hope, leads to more, not less, participation in the struggle for a just world.

  Harvey Cox

  Struggle, World, Comic

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• Most Americans think of hunger as a problem affecting only places like India, Africa or South America. But it is a tragic reality that our country has millions of children who are suffering from lack of food. We must all work together to save our country from this problem.

  Beverly Johnson

  Country, Children, Reality

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• Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.

  Henry Adams

  Mind, President, Firsts

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• One of the tragic consequences of divorce is that the kids are legally obligated by the courts to spend a fixed amount of time with their dads. In normal families, dads and children happily ignore each other.

  C.D. Payne

  Children, Dad, Kids

  C.D. Payne (2009). “Youth in Revolt: Now a major motion picture from Dimension Films starring Michael Cera”, p.14, Broadway Books

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• Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension; when he does not torment himself with childish guilt feelings, but avoids tragic adult sins; when he postpones immediate pleasures for the sake of long-term values.... Our generation must be inspired to search for that maturity which will manifest itself in the qualities of tenacity, dependability, co-operativeness and the inner drive to work and sacrifice for a nobler future of mankind.

  Joshua L. Liebman

  Sacrifice, Maturity, Our Generation

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• Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Change, Night, Light

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• The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world

  Georges Simenon

  Communication, Two, People

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

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• The tragic reality of today is reflected in the true plight of our spiritual existence. We are spineless and cannot stand straight.

  Ai Weiwei

  Spiritual, Reality, Plight

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• The most tragic moment of my life was the first show I ever designed for. I had been asked to make shoes for Ossie Clark's show in the early '70s. I was so inexperienced that I didn't put the steel in the heels of the shoes, which is required to support the shoe and the wearer. So the girls came out walking very strangely in these rubber, bendy high-heeled shoes I had made. I thought 'Oh dear god! This is the end of me.' But after the show, even David Hockney and Cecil Beaton said to me 'It was so interesting that the girls were moving in such a different way.'

  Manolo Blahnik

  Girl, Moving, Shoes

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• My life has been tragic and disastrous since birth.

  Taylor Caldwell

  Birth, Has Beens

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• Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

  Janette Turner Hospital

  Moving, Erotic, Historical

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• Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Views, World, Matter

  Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth Clement Lindsay, Peter Vergo (1994). “Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art”

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• Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today... It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on.

  Asger Jorn

  Art, People, Enemy

  Asger Jorn, Per Hovdenakk, Stine Høholt, Arken museum for moderne kunst (Ishøj, Denmark), Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Amstelveen, Netherlands) (2002). “Asger Jorn”

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• Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don’t have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.

  Rob Bell

  People, Scary, Rooms

  Rob Bell (2013). “The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place”, p.16, HarperCollins UK

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• There are a lot of problems in the world, a lot of tragic things that have to be addressed, economic, medical, political, all kinds of things, but, to my way of thinking, they pale in comparison to the overall problem of the environmental deadline.

  Dean Stockwell

  Thinking, Political, Environmental

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• Artists know failure. It is not tragic that they know failure; it is only tragic if they know failure and little else.

  Eric Maisel

  Failure, Artist, Littles

  Eric Maisel (1996). “Affirmations for Artists”, Tarcher

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• It is tragic that the Fuehrer should have the whole nation behind him with the single exception of the Army generals. In my opinion it is only by action that they can now atone for their faults of lack of character and discipline.

  Alfred Jodl

  Character, Army, Should Have

  "The Trial of the Germans". Book by Eugene Davidson, p. 347 (August 10, 1938), 1997.

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• Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we're either visionaries, `noble savages,' squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We're very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.

  Wilma Mankiller

  Real, Men, Thinking

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• A senseless tragedy remains forever tragic, but it is up to us whether it remains forever senseless.

  Robert Breault

  Perspective, Forever, Tragedy

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• Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic.

  Andrew Coyle Bradley

  Jobs, Children, East

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