The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people.

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God the tragedy is that knowing Him they still insist on going their own way.

Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious it's hilarious.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

After the tragedy New Yorkers are more united than ever in their vision as well as in appreciation what living in freedom means - and that if we stand together we can accomplish anything.

What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.

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.

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

More than any other setting - more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel - I'll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy tragedy and intrigue.

I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.

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.

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing has no education no money lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another through sheer force of will he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

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.

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this and we have now to regard it from another side.

My book 'Trust Your Heart' which is the story of my life will be followed by 'Singing Lessons' a memoir of love loss hope and healing which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

A tragedy need not have blood and death it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling the death of inspired response the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.

One death is a tragedy one million is a statistic.

There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up... a lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

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?