President Barack Obama, to his credit, has given - issued personal pardons in deserving cases. But he should go far beyond. He should proceed to what is in fact an urgent necessity: to grant a general pardon to 11 million people who are living and working here, productive citizens in all but name, threatened with deportation by the incoming Donald Trump administration. This would be a horrible humanitarian tragedy, a moral outrage.
In an environment in which tragedy is genuine and frequent, laughter is essential to sanity.
The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.
It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
Why does a tragedy like 911 change everything about air travel, but numerous gun massacres CHANGE NOTHING?
The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.
Somehow even tragedies seem less tragical, when you are the actors in them, than they look to outsiders
Studies of people who report high well-being in their fifties and sixties indicate that they have lived lives that involved personal risks. They are not people whose lives have been calm and predictable. A life under tight control sometimes produces quiet desperation. High well-being is a life that has depth and quality. Risks, losses, problems, and tragedy add pain to a life. That pain becomes a teacher. We learn; the pain gives us no choice.
If everyone is a hero, then disasters and atrocities lose their meaning. It's only when certain people are heroes and others are not that these tragedies and disasters that mankind faces take on meaning.
I feel like there are women who are genuinely born to be mothers, and women who are born to be aunties, and women who really probably not should be allowed near children. The tragedy that happens is when any one of those women ends up in the wrong category.
Optimist: someone who isn't sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play.
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 tragedy of our time is that we've got it backwards, we've learned to love techniques and use people.
But our comedies never endured long without a tragedy.
People have something on their mind. It almost feels [on marches against now-President Donald Trump] like after-tragedy. People seem sort of preoccupied.
Do not measure the number of tragedies you sustain, but to quantify the success you derive from them.
Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.
It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,'? says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.
Every time there's a tragedy, everything goes up.
Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.