Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

-Barnes,Julian Patrick
  A History of the World in101    Chapters,'Parenthesis'.

Farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.

-Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  Table Talk (published1835), entry for 25  Aug.

   Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in the world reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, section1.

Dinner at the Huntercombes possessed 'only two dramatic featuresöthe wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.'

-Powell, Anthony Dymoke
  TheAcceptanceWorld, ch.4.

Ceremony, circus, farce, melodrama, tragedy†nothing else offers all at once the whirl, the excitement, the gaiety, the intrigue and the anguish.

-Schlesinger, Arthur M(eier),Jr
  On national political conventions. AThousand Days.

Hissensuality has all drifted intosexual vanity, delight for being the candletothemoths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity† His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationshipsöthe lack of a sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideasöall these defects came largely from the flippant and worthless self- complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women.

-Webb, (Martha) Beatrice ne¤  e Potter
  Of George Bernard Shaw. Diary entry, 8 May.