Henry Kissinger Quotes
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Quotes to Explore
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Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.
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Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.
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Gangster movies are the inheritor of the Greek tragedy: it's the only genre where the audience will be disappointed if there's not a tragic ending.
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I trust people too much, and the other tragedy is I can't say no.
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I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.
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There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.
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A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
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What having a Down's syndrome child isn't - and I feel very strongly about this - is a tragedy. All those pregnancy books you read when you are expecting refer to Down's syndrome as if it were the worst possible outcome, and it's not.
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One of the advantages of appearing in such a play is that you begin to understand it properly, I feel Ophelia's tragedy was that she had been so used by everybody and felt that she bore a great burden of guilt.
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A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.
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We Jews have been too adaptable. We have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies for the sake of social conformity. … Even in modern civilization, the Jew is most happy if he remains a Jew.
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The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization.
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This is an American tragedy of enormous proportions and it's going to take a long time to bring it back to where it was let alone better.
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The tragedy unfolding in Zimbabwe is driven by one man's ruthless campaign to hang on to power whatever the cost to others in the process.
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The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again.
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The tragedy is that everyone thinks they already have goals. But what they really have are hopes and wishes.
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
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Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.
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Why put it on if you're not going to strut?
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That moderation which nature prescribes, which limits our desires by resources restricted to our needs, has abandoned the field; it has now come to this -- that to want only what is enough is a sign both of boorishness and of utter destitution.
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Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
