Tragic Quotes - Page 5

• Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Communication, Thinking, Errors

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• That freedom can never be attained by a nation without suffering and sacrifice has been amply borne out by the recent tragic happenings in this subcontinent.

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah

  Sacrifice, Suffering, Quaid Azam

  Speech at a rally at the University Stadium, Lahore, October 30, 1947.

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• Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible.

  Jessica Brown Findlay

  Book, Laughing, Stories

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I was supposed to do The Joy Of Sex with John Belushi, but the week before we were gonna start filming, he died. So that was really tragic. That put the whole project on the shelf.

  P. J. Soles

  Joy, Week

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.

  James Fenton

  Song, Purpose, May

  James Fenton (2003). “An Introduction to English Poetry”, p.10, Penguin UK

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• I can't go on. I'll go on.

  Samuel Beckett

  Grieving, Tragedy, Goes On

  The Unnamable (1959)

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• I quit painting very early. I just jumped ship. In a way, the window is the tragic possibility - you can jump out into your future. That kind of action is more like a direction. It's that same thinking that brought me to New York.

  Tehching Hsieh

  Thinking, Action, Painting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I was young, my knowledge of the literary world was a distorted tabloid sketch of dazzling fame, suffering genius, and tragic glamour. It was all very naïve. Of course, the only part of the stereotype that has proven true is the suffering and the starving. Now, my fantasy of scribbling poems in a tower is gone, but an anxiety about reviews, book sales, and awards has taken its place.

  Robin Beth Schaer

  Book, Taken, Anxiety

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Athens is the birthplace of modern tragedy. In the Greek tragic plays, the tableau of the characters would become a statue, like the statue of Oedipus reaching up to the Gods with blood spilling out of his eyes. I love the way the Greeks would immortalize experience. Things that all of us feel.

  Simon Van Booy

  Character, Eye, Greek

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.

  Tony Judt

  Past, Thinking, Perfect

  "Postwar". Interview With Julian Brookes, www.motherjones.com. December 20, 2005.

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• Something is fundamentally amiss when you refer to a person as illegal. Bottom line. That's why we so easily talk about this like we're talking about plants or crops. These illegals. My God, man, it's so tragic to me traveling around this country, this country that is getting more and more Latino, and you hear people use the words "illegal" and "Mexican" interchangeably. Interchangeably. Without blinking an eye.

  Jose Antonio Vargas

  Country, Eye, Men

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• There is a malaise that exists in your land - what appears to many as the sudden and tragic disappearance of the American dream which, in some ways, has turned to nightmare. J. J. Greene Quotes.

  Unknown

  Dream, American Dream, Nightmare

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• I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

  Unknown

  Brother, Thinking, Feelings

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• I think that artists don't make art - the art makes itself through us. I'm not the doer. I'm just along for the ride. Acting really reminds me of that because I don't write the words; I don't make the decisions. That's the director. Narcissism is a tragic condition. It must be so miserable to live trapped in a reflection that only includes the smallest version of our identities. Our true identities should have no bounds and no limits.

  Ezra Miller

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The stark and tragic images of human suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reminded us yet again that civil rights and equal rights are still the great unfinished business of America. The suffering has been disproportionately borne by the weak, the poor, the elderly and infirm, and largely African-Americans, who were forced by poverty, illness, unequal opportunity to stay behind and bear the brunt of the storm's winds and floods. I believe that kind of disparate impact is morally wrong in this, the richest country in the world.

  Edward Kennedy

  Country, Believe, Opportunity

  "Second Day of Hearings on the Nomination of Judge Roberts", www.nytimes.com. September 13, 2005.

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• The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, 'Let no one be called happy till his death;' to which I would add, 'Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.'

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Happiness, Death, Greek

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Illustrated)”, p.1033, Delphi Classics

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• We are not held accountable for how the economy ravages Congo. Governments aren't held accountable for foreign policies that they exercise there. There are no institutional structures to render justice. The press is very limited. There's very little transparency. You find a symmetry in certain basic human tendencies, and these tendencies are not always noble or beautiful. I think we have an instinct to turn away from that, to not acknowledge it, while it is something that's a part of us. There's a certain tragic and sad side to human nature that, in our quest for beauty, we ignore.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Beautiful, Exercise, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The question does arise if how and why to write poetry in this time. It feels both completely essential and also quite difficult. But that's how writing poetry has felt to me my whole life. Everything seems to have just gotten immensely more mortal and tragic and scary, which makes it hard to concentrate, but also, if harnessed, can provide immense energy for making poems.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Writing, Scary, Energy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The Long Red Road is a story about alcoholism and dysfunction and tragic tale of a man who's trying to drink himself to death on an Indian reservation in Dakota. It was written for me, so it's something I would love to do.

  Tom Hardy

  Men, Long, Trying

  "Rough Character". Interview with Michael Slenske, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 13, 2009.

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• I love William Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That's some serious ghetto expletive. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.

  Tupac Shakur

  Real, Fall, Ghetto

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• The scientists who made the atomic bomb are, in my sense, people with a tragic destiny. You know, there was the US race with Nazi Germany and good evidence that the Germans were more advanced in nuclear physics, and we had to get the bomb first. But then there was the use of that dreadful weapon, or instrument of genocide, and many of the more sensitive scientists turned quickly into anti - nuclear people - and very effective ones.

  Robert Jay Lifton

  Destiny, People, Physics

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

  Wendy Cope

  Happy Life, Thinking, Plot

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• At the present moment in our culture this yearning for meaning and consciousness, this yearning to give and serve something higher than ourselves, is breaking through the hard crust of our widespread cultural materialism and pseudo-scientific underestimation of what a human being is meant to be together with an equally tragic overestimation of what we human beings are capable of in our present everyday state of being. The intensity of the present confusion about the nature and existence of God is a symptom of this yearning within the whole of our modern culture.

  Jacob Needleman

  Giving, Confusion, Everyday

  Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com

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• The refusal to acknowledge the scientific value of embryonic stem cell research is one more tragic misstep.

  Lois Capps

  Cells, Research, Refusal

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• Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

  Henry Adams

  Power, Political, President

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