Tragedy Violence Quotes & Sayings

We cannot stop every act of senseless violence. We cannot know every evil that lurks in troubled minds. But if we can prevent even one tragedy like this, save even one life, spare other families what these families are going through, certainly we've got an obligation to try. — Barack Obama

I think the ties to slavery and the terrible tragedy that followed the Civil War with Jim Crow and racial violence is closely linked to the Confederate flag. — William R. Ferris

There's been an awful lot of silence in make culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children ... we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that. — Jackson Katz

The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate. — Kenneth Tynan

The Marikana tragedy calls to mind earlier instances of violence. At Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1, 1886, and then at Fourmies, in northern France, on May 1, 1891, police fired on workers striking for higher wages. Does this kind of violent clash between labor and capital belong to the past, or will it be an integral part of twenty-first-century history? — Thomas Piketty

Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. — Whittaker Chambers

Boxing is made for film - there is corruption, violence, tragedy and the chance that the underdog can catch the champion with one lucky punch. — Asif Kapadia

When I was younger, I'd make a point of driving to the middle of nowhere and spending an evening with just me, the wind, and the moon. Your skin crawls up an octave. This is what I tap into when I'm working on horror films. I'm just afraid a time will come when I lose touch with that part of myself. — Christopher Young

Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released. — Greg Marinovich

In business, three things are necessary: knowledge, temper, and time. — Owen Felltham

The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter bombs even as violence cannot be by counter-violence. — Mahatma Gandhi

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system ... For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems. — Nick Harkaway

Violence against women is not random or anonymous. In West Virginia, 88 percent of sexual-assault victims already know their attacker. In my hometown, Alicia McCormick, an advocate for our domestic-violence shelter at the YWCA, was killed in her home by a man doing handiwork in her apartment complex. That one of my greatest advocates could fall victim to something she fought against her whole life was a tragedy that moved me to action. — Shelley Moore Capito

The girls were screaming in Tamil, except for one, who was repeating the word "epa" like a loud and shrill chant. That was not how the Sinhala word was usually used, but it was an expression Mugil had ofen heard Sinhalese policeman and the army lob at civilians. Epa! when they didn't want you to sell apples by the road in Jaffna. Epa! when you tried to drive on at the checkpoint at Vavuniya. Epa! Don't! The girl's voice seemed to ring through all of Kilinochchi. — Rohini Mohan

She was beautiful and radiant. He remembered the concern in her eyes. The same concern drove her now, pushing her toward acts of violence. On the surface, he'd be a fool to turn her down. She was driven by tragedy, just like him, and she would be incorruptible, just like him. He needed a blade to kill, but she could kill dozens at once empty-handed. She was Death, and she had just asked to be his ally. — Ilona Andrews

When unspeakable violence is enacted upon innocents, say, in a school or movie theatre, and the survivors and the families of the victims, in the throes of pain and anguish, want to ask, "Why did this happen?," "How did this happen?," and "What can we do to prevent this from happening again?," and one of the areas they (still we) focus their scrutiny is that of the highly efficient weapons of warfare that are casually available to us citizens of the United States, then we frightened gun owners have the chance to be human and say, "Okay, this is a horrible tragedy. Let's open up a conversation here." Instead, I'm surmising, out of fear, we throw up our defenses and behave in a very confrontational way toward such a conversation , citing the Second Amendment as the ultimate protection of our rights, no matter how ridiculously murderous the firearm, which, unfortunately, makes us look like dicks. — Nick Offerman

Did you see, after this horrific tragedy in Boston, that [Barack] Obama cannot utter the word 'terrorist.' It's not politically correct. He even called the Fort Hood murderer 'workplace violence.' Because it's politically incorrect to talk about 'jihad,' or to talk about 'terrorist,' or to talk about 'the war on terror.' He won't say those words, because they're politically incorrect. — Rafael Cruz

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. — Martin Gardner

Within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible. — Sarah Palin

She raised her eyes to his. They had both come from misery, she thought, and survived it. They had been drawn together through violence and tragedy, and had overcome it. They walked different paths and had found a mutual route.
Some things last, she thought. Some ordinary things. Like love. — J.D. Robb

For me, as a child, I certainly thought that there were more black people in the world than white people. — Keegan-Michael Key

There should have been a dark whisper in the wind. Or maybe a deep chill in the bone. Something. An ethereal song only Elizabeth or I could hear. A tightness in the air. Some textbook premonition. There are misfortunes we almost expect in life - what happened to my parents, for example - and then there are other dark moments, moments of sudden violence that alter everything. There was my life before the tragedy. There is my life now. The two have very little in common. — Harlan Coben

The problem with setting goals is that they can be limiting. Perhaps we're asking for something good when God's will is that we be given something great. — Marianne Williamson

Okay, I said, what's so hot about playing the piano?
She told me that the most important thing was to establish the tenderness right off the bat, or at least close to the top of the piece, just a hint of it, a whisper, but a deep whisper because the tension will mount, the excitement and the drama will build - I was writing it down as fast as I could - and when the action rises the audience might remember the earlier moment of tenderness, and remembering will make them long to return to infancy, to safety, to pure love, then you might move away from that, put the violence and agony of life into every note, building, building still, until there is an important decision to make: return to tenderness, even briefly, glancingly, or continue on with the truth, the violence, the pain, the tragedy, to the very end. — Miriam Toews

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin. — James Caskey

It is the law of love that rules mankind. Had violence, i.e. hate, rules us we would have become extinct long ago. And yet, the tragedy of it is that the so-called civilised men and nations conduct themselves as if the basis of society was violence. — Mahatma Gandhi

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. — Whittaker Chambers

'Fargo' is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that's what makes it tragic. It's about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same. — Noah Hawley

Books are the beehives of thought; laconics, the honey taken from them. — James Ellis

In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions. — John Cage

Cash flows from operating activities are the cash effects
of revenue and expense transactions that are included in the income statement.
4
Cash flows
from investing activities are the cash effects of purchasing and selling assets, such as land and
buildings. Cash flows from financing activities are the cash effects of the owners investing in
the company and creditors loaning money to the company and the repayment of either or both. — Williams

It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy. — Thomas Paine

For the world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that Communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America's phobia about world Communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world's eyes. Today America has become the world's nightmare. When an uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable team can flaunt the historic and traditional codes of civilization by disregarding the honor and sovereignty of other countries large and small, by intervening in the internal affairs of other countries for reasons real and contrived, the rest of the world does fear for its own welfare and for the future of this country. — L. Fletcher Prouty

Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote. — Gary Steiner

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must
start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that
right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However
far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power
and airtight roles within the family. — Gloria Steinem

I used to just write about my own apathy, but that youthful, apathetic way of looking at things grew thin as I got older. — Scott Weiland

I wasn't a very good student. I prefer to learn by experience. — Cristin Milioti

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us. — Oscar Wilde

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world — Ron Rash

It [9/11 tragedy] was the spectacle, what al-Qaeda gets its main power from - why their terrorism truly earns the word "acts." They are very theatrical, always - the simultaneous violence, the grandiose, symbolic gestures (the number 911, "United" and "American" flights, the World Trade as target etc). And then its aftermath. — Porochista Khakpour

Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance. — Gary Steiner

Margaret . . ." The name was part groan, part growl. She was filled with a sweet, aching longing to bridge the lingering space between them. She leaned down and their lips met in a feather touch. Sparks thrilled her every nerve. He angled his head to deepen the kiss, pressing his mouth to hers, fervently, fiercely. Her head felt light, her pulse pounded. What was she doing? The heady, delicious kiss took her off guard. She had never expected such a passionate, forceful embrace from a man she had once thought timid. A man who doesn't know what he is doing, she reminded herself. Who is dreaming. She, on the other hand, knew very well what she was doing. She tried to pull away but, leaning over as she was, fell forward, her elbows spearing his chest. Crying out, she scrambled out of his hold and to her feet. — Julie Klassen