Tragic Vision Quotes

A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

While those with the vision of the anointed emphasize the knowledge and resources available to promote the various policy programs they favor, those with the tragic vision of the human condition emphasize that these resources are taken from other uses (“there is no free lunch”) and that the knowledge and wisdom required to run ambitious social programs far exceed what any human being has ever possessed, as the unintended negative consequences of such programs repeatedly demonstrate.

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

“Hard cases make bad law” is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case—but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.

The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the non-tragic.

The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.

While those with the tragic vision may see social issues in terms of making the best choice among limited and often unpalatable alternatives, those with the vision of the anointed tend to see these same issues in terms of what should be done to make things right in the cosmic scheme of things.