Life & Wisdom Quote by Amos Oz

Tragedy, for Amos Oz, isn’t the cheap thrill of watching villains get what’s coming. It’s the sickening moment when two moral claims collide and neither can be dismissed without doing violence to your own conscience. Calling tragedy a “clash between right and right” rejects the comforting architecture of most political storytelling, which depends on casting one side as deluded, corrupt, or monstrous. Oz is arguing that the hardest conflicts are hard precisely because both camps have intelligible histories, real wounds, and legitimate fears.

The line also smuggles in a demand: if you want to behave ethically, you have to learn to narrate the other side’s “right” without sarcasm. That’s a writer’s discipline more than a diplomat’s. Oz, shaped by Israel’s founding mythos and its ongoing conflict, spent his career insisting that empathy is not surrender. His fiction and essays return to the same uncomfortable insight: the region’s catastrophe isn’t a misunderstanding that a single revelation can fix; it’s a tragic structure where competing goods (safety, home, self-determination) are mutually obstructive.

The phrasing matters. “My definition” is modest, even domestic, but it’s also a claim of authority grounded in lived observation rather than theory. “Clash” is physical and immediate, not abstract debate. Oz’s subtext is a rebuke to ideologues who treat complexity as weakness: insisting on “right and right” is a way to keep moral seriousness alive when propaganda begs you to pick a simpler plot.