Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Tragedy

Quotes about: Tragedy

• Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Hope, Fear, Lying

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.36, W. W. Norton & Company

• The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Real, Rare Events, Tragedy

  Stephen Jay Gould (1993). “Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history”, Vintage

• Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we have divided a group of nonfood substances into two categories: items purchasable for supposed pleasure (such as alcohol), and illicit drugs.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Two, Alcohol, Drug

• The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Powerful, Airplane, Men

  "I Have Landed". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 390: "The Good People of Halifax", 2002.

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