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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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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It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.
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Like many survivors it has taken me years to understand the impact upon my life. At some point we realize that we trusted someone we should have feared and we fear those genuine relationships that we should trust.
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It’s like when footballers run underwater in water tanks…There’s a high pressure against your body. If you can run fast in a water tank, when they take you out of the water, you can run way faster because there’s less pressure. I used to go on to radio sets and be spraying so fast, people would be like, ‘How are you doing that?’
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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.
