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It is the virtue and the pathos of man that he aspires endlessly toward a better world; it is his weakness and his tragedy that he does nothing to bring such a world even one step nearer.

—Ludwig Lewisohn

virtue weakness world tragedy pathos

About Ludwig Lewisohn

Portrait of Ludwig Lewisohn

Ludwig Lewisohn (May 30, 1882 – December 31, 1955) was a novelist, literary critic, the drama critic for The Nation and then its associate editor. He was the editor of the New Palestine, an American Zionist journal. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Ohio State University as...

More quotations tagged with “tragedy”

When I was a child, a volcano erupted unexpectedly in Iceland, burying a small town at the foot of its cone. All the children in the town were in school at the time, and they all perished. The parents sent their sons and daughters out the door that morning, same as they always did, and never saw them again. I remember my mother being profoundly moved by that tragedy. She always made sure that the last words we had in the morning were loving ones. That cannot always have been easy, but my memory is that she usually succeeded.

—Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

love memory tragedy

Imagine, a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger. Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable.

—Carl Sagan

war history nuclear weapons USA tragedy Soviet Union

History

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