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.'

It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.

Bad days will come for each one of us, and the more we've thought these things through ahead of time, the better prepared we'll be when tragedy strikes or struggles emerge.

Everyone gets wounded in this world and everyone has within them some golden qualities that can serve to heal the wounds of time and the traumatic effects of human tragedy.

We had a branding problem. We have allowed ourselves to be branded by our tragedies. If you said 'Oklahoma City,' chances are the next word out of your mouth was 'bombing.'

The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

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.

What I'm interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.

Until all students are faced by the tragedies, the contradictions and the stark questions of life, they cannot understand the need for redemption or God's redemptive action.

Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.

The tragedy is that political leaders failed so badly at delivering what Iraqis clearly wanted - and for that, a great deal of responsibility lies with Prime Minister Maliki.

This is not a museum of tragedy. It is not the museum of difficult moments. It is the museum that says -here is a balanced history of America that allows us to cry and smile.

Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.

Chuck Lorre and everyone else on 'Mom' did such a great job of balancing that line that rides tragedy and comedy. They make you cry, and then they make you crack up about it.

I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal.

The Ukrainian nation, as no other nation, understands and is fully aware of the tragedy and its scale of all the lost lives of the Ukrainian Jews during the Second World War.

I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel - a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

The world is full of tragedy; and sympathy, a little common sympathy, can do so much to soften the worst of grief. It is for the lack of that, that people despair and go down.

'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.

As the crisis in Syria grows and the humanitarian tragedy becomes more clear, I appreciated Prime Minister Netanyahu's perspective on the changes and volatility in the region.

The tragedy is not so much the experience that you're having. The tragedy is that we don't take the time to understand the meaning and purpose behind what we're going through.

When I was young, I wanted to be a dramatic writer, a writer of tragedy. Nothing would've pleased me more than if I could have written like Eugene O'Neil or Tennessee Williams.

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

You are going to share in the most intimate parts of your patients' lives. You will share in their moments of tragedy. But you will also share in their moments of greatest joy.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Tragedy, loss, and hurt often arrive unanticipated. How we react when we are surprised will tell our families whether what we have taught and testified lies deep in our hearts.

I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict.

What we are doing is deeply unfair and a profound tragedy - what we're doing in the way of global warming, what we're doing to the oceans - and none of it makes any sense to me.

The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person.

To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?

It's all a terrible tragedy. And yet, in it's details, it's great fun. And - apart from the tragedy - I've never felt happier or better in my life than in those days in Belgium.

When I learned about this tragedy that's happening in Midway - you know, these birds whose stomachs are filled with handfuls of our waste - I just felt drawn there magnetically.

City government can and must help San Franciscans prepare for emergencies in order to avoid tragedy where possible and minimize loss of life and property when emergencies occur.

My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy losing four Americans - two diplomats and, now it's public so I can say, two CIA operatives.

How can we help students to understand that the tragedy of life is not death; the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined and convictions undeclared and service unfulfilled?

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

I have a pretty good math mind, so I can see patterns, but I don't have a great ear. It's like a tragedy - I can see so much more natural musical ability in so many other people.

We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realisation that nothing will change.

Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.

Japan learned from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the tragedy wrought by nuclear weapons must never be repeated and that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

Easter is not limited to the passion and death of Christ; it also includes the dismal tragedy of life unlived by the many, and all the loss of passion and truth that goes with it.

The Holocaust is the most documented tragedy in recorded history. And therefore, later on, if there will be a later on, anyone wishing to know will know where to go for knowledge.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

I would have to have some tragedy and romance in my life, but I've actually had a very cushioned, caring upbringing. I'm desperately seeking some edge. Maybe I'll find it one day.

Our happiness is certainly mixed in with the tragedies of life. You have to find the lemonade. You have to find the silver lining in the middle of everything that happens in life.

I've enjoyed my life. There has been great tragedy but also moments of great happiness. I've taken both in my stride, and if I were to replay my life, I would do it all over again.

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