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Love Quote by Ben Kingsley

"One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer"

About this Quote

Drama, for Kingsley, isn’t escapism; it’s a language upgrade. He’s pointing at a quiet superpower of performance: it can take words we’ve worn down through repetition - love, home, family, loyalty, envy - and make them sharp again. Not by defining them like a dictionary, but by staging the messy consequences of believing in them. When a character chooses “loyalty” over self-respect, or calls a place “home” that’s actually a trap, the term stops being a comforting label and starts acting like a moral question.

The subtext is slightly corrective, even impatient: everyday speech flattens experience, and culture often treats “serious” drama as nutritional medicine you’re supposed to take. Kingsley flips that. Great drama doesn’t just mirror life; it edits our internal captions for it. It’s an argument for art as a kind of emotional re-education, where empathy isn’t a soft feeling but a cognitive shift: you leave with different definitions because you’ve lived inside someone else’s stakes.

His line about tragedy “need not be a downer” is also a defense against a particular modern reflex - the idea that bleak stories are automatically pretentious or punishing. Tragedy can be clarifying, even invigorating, because it strips away the sentimental versions of those big words and shows what they cost. The “uplift” isn’t a happy ending; it’s the relief of honesty, the thrill of seeing language match reality for once.

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TopicArt
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Kingsley, Ben. (2026, January 17). One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-greatest-things-drama-can-do-at-its-69863/

Chicago Style
Kingsley, Ben. "One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-greatest-things-drama-can-do-at-its-69863/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-greatest-things-drama-can-do-at-its-69863/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Ben Add to List
How Drama Redefines Love, Home, Family and Loyalty
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Ben Kingsley (born December 31, 1943) is a Actor from England.

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