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).
Dawn Powell

The calls that I have received from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the fact that there are other people that are suffering every bit as much as I am, and that our whole nation is going through a tragedy together, I think we have to think about those things.
Ted Olson

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
Arthur Miller

The Constitution is never tested during times of tranquility; it is during times of tension, turmoil, tragedy, trauma, and terrorism that it is sorely tested.
Mike Honda

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.
John F. Kennedy

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

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead

The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.
Aaron Allston

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg

The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.
Maxwell Anderson

The government needs to help those in need, but members of Congress shouldn't take advantage of the situation and use a national tragedy as an opportunity to spend taxpayer dollars on their pet projects.
Chris Chocola

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Huxley

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Arthur C. Clarke

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.
Rebecca H. Davis

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.
Ahmed Chalabi

The key element in tragedy is that heroes and heroines are destroyed by that which appears to be their greatest strength.
Robert Shea

The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.
Gene Tierney

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
Richard Bach

The memories of the Munich games for me are of triumph and tragedy.
Mark Spitz

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.
Laurence Olivier