Hungarian Quotes

You'd think people had better things to gossip about," said Ginny as she sat on the common room floor, leaning against Harry’s legs and reading the Daily Prophet. "Three Dementor attacks in a week, and all Romilda Vane does is ask me if it’s true you’ve got a Hippogriff tattooed across your chest." Ron and Hermione both roared with laughter. Harry ignored them. What did you tell her?" I told her it's a Hungarian Horntail," said Ginny, turning a page of the newspaper idly. "Much more macho." Thanks," said Harry, grinning. "And what did you tell her Ron’s got?" A Pygmy Puff, but I didn’t say where.

It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.

I trust no one. Not even myself.” —Joesph Stalin

I knew Ginny was lying about that tattoo.

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.

So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

(Hungarian...) the only tongue the devil respects.

A persistent rumor has circulates in the USA: There are two intelligent races living on the surface of planet Earth: the standard people and the hungarians.

Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop

Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.

Then there are some minor points that strike me as suggestive - for instance, the position of Mrs. Hubbard's sponge bag, the name of Mrs. Armstrong's mother, the detective methods of Mr. Hardman, the suggestion of Mr. MacQueen that Ratchett himself destroyed the charred note we found, Princess Dragomiroff's Christian name, and a grease spot on a Hungarian passport.

Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, once offered the opinion that “life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.

Very much. Very much a melting pot. You don’t draw lines anymore. There’s no such thing as ‘bloody this’ or ‘bloody that’. There’s no such thing anymore. We all Aussies. And the Aussies respect us as Aussies. I am accepted as an Australian and I feel like one too. - Ibolya Cabrero-Kovacs, Hungarian Freedom Fighter

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book.

In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)

Communism existed once, during two 45 minute half-times, when Honved, from Budapest, won over England by 6-3. The English played individually, and the Hungarians, collectively.

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them. And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river and I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.

The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western world.

I admire the Queen greatly,” Casanova confided in me. “She can tie a man up by his thumbs, discuss philosophy with Diderot and Voltaire, and plot and scheme like a Dutch diplomat. She has voracious appetites, uses exquisite French scents, is kind to animals, fences like a Hungarian hussar, recreates herself on a white silk swing in a room full of mirrors, and gives afternoon tea parties for society ladies. Useful horsewoman, too.

…in joy he will invariably dance; when he is in love he will dance, for the czardas helps him to explain to the girl he loves exactly what he feels for her. And she understands. One czardas will reveal to a Hungarian village maid the state of her lover’s heart far more clearly than do all the whisperings behind hedges in more civilized lands.

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again; And who the hell are you anyway . . .?

The Stadium Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.

When I was a boy of seven or eight I read a novel untitled "Abafi" — The Son of Aba — a Servian translation from the Hungarian of Josika, a writer of renown. The lessons it teaches are much like those of "Ben Hur," and in this respect it might be viewed as anticipatory of the work of Wallace. The possibilities of will-power and self-control appealed tremendously to my vivid imagination, and I began to discipline myself. Had I a sweet cake or a juicy apple which I was dying to eat I would give it to another boy and go through the tortures of Tantalus, pained but satisfied. Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day by day from morning till night. At first it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical.

The Hungarians have a wonderful word,' said Trefusis. 'It is puszipajtás and means roughly "someone you know well enough to kiss in the street". They are a demonstrative and affectionate people, the Hungarians, and enthusiastic social kissers. "Do you know young Adrian?" you might ask and they might reply, "I know him, but we're not exactly puszipajtás.

A Hungarian Jew, as he looked to observe, is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first.

We Hungarians can’t end a night of drinking without eating sauerkraut soup. Mariska brings steaming bowls of it.

I admit I have a Hungarian temper. Why not? I am from Hungary. We are descendants of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. —ZSA ZSA GABOR

which follows the fortunes of an aristocratic Hungarian

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.

A week ago, Harry would have said finding a partner for a dance would be a cinch compared to taking on a Hungarian Horntail. But now that he had done the latter, and was facing the prospect of asking a girl to the ball, he thought he’d rather have another round with the dragon. Harry had never known so many

Albert von Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian Nobel Prize–winning physiologist who first discovered the benefits of vitamin C, was fond of saying, “Discovery lies in seeing what everyone sees, but thinking what no one else has thought.” That

Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!" the Hungarian police were screaming. That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.

Lehet, hogy ő is meghalt már, csak nem vette még észre? Lehet, hogy az ember hamarabb meghal, mint tudomást szerezne erről?

Milyen érdekes, hogy az ember oly könnyen kiönti a szívét egy darab papírnak, miközben szemtől szemben megszólalni sem mer.

A "mi lett volna, ha?" a legizgalmasabb értelmetlen kérdés.

Every Hungarian wishes to die an elegant gentleman

Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? That gallant Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and closed the boozers at half past ten?

The Danube is not blue, as Karl Isidore Beck calls it in the lines which suggested to Strauss the fetching, mendacious title of his waltz. The Danube is blond, 'a szöke Duna', as the Hungarians say, but even that 'blond' is a Magyar gallantry, or a French one, since in 1904 Gaston Lavergnolle called it Le Beau Danube blond. More down to earth, Jules Verne thought of entitling a novel Le Beau Danube jaune. Muddy yellow is the water that grows murky at the bottom of these [the Strudlhof] steps.

to be Hungarian is not to belong to a people, but instead it’s an illness, an incurable, frightening disease, a misfortune of epidemic proportions that could overcome every single observer with nausea,

Andrea had brought kifli: crescent-shaped rolls first baked by Hungarians to commemorate the Turks’ defeat in Vienna, and later introduced by Marie Antoinette in Paris, where they became known as croissants.

Tell me,' he asked, with some embarassment, as we strolled along: 'you're a bloody German, aren't you?' 'Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.' 'Hungarian?' 'Hungarian.' 'What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on? 'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.' 'And where do you Hungarians live?' 'In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'. 'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.

There are clouds between us and them," pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not.

There are clouds, between us and them,” pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black moustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not.

ten thousand Soviet evacuees had been drowned off Tallinn, and twenty-three thousand Hungarian Jews murdered at Kamenets Podolsk, in the same three day period. But these were far from the only deaths in those few August days.

Magyarország a képzelet országa. Kitaláljuk magunknak az országot, függetlenül a reálisan létezőtől. Futballország volnánk, de sose nyertünk világbajnokságot; olvasom, hogy irodalmi nagyhatalom volnánk, és a kutya sem ismeri a világban az irodalmunkat, itt a két világháború közt úgy volt királyság, hogy király nem volt hozzá. A káprázat országa.

THE VASTNESS OF OUR MEMORY Holography also explains how our brains can store so many memories in so little space. The brilliant Hungarian-born physicist and mathematician John von Neumann once calculated that over the course of the average human lifetime, the brain stores something on the order of 2. 8 x 1020 (280, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) bits of information. This is a staggering amount of information, and brain researchers have long struggled to come up with a mechanism that explains such a vast capability. Interestingly, holograms also possess a fantastic capacity for information storage. By changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. Any image thus recorded can be retrieved simply by illuminating the film with a laser beam possessing the same angle as the original two beams. By employing this method researchers have calculated that a one-inch-square of film can store the same amount of information contained in fifty Bibles!

HAPPINESS I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell      me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of      thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though      I was trying to fool with them And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along      the Desplaines river And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with      their women and children and a keg of beer and an      accordion.

The road up and the road down are one and the same." Heraclitus

Hát ennyi volt az én hollywoodi karrierem - ez volt az utolsó estém Hollywoodban, a parkoló klotyója mögött ültem, és kentem a mustárt a szendvicseimre.

It is not the business of a Queen to be human.

Now we live in fairyland. The only lightly disappointing thing about this land is that it is smaller than the real world has ever been.

Az idő mindent meggyógyít, csak épp igazságot nem szolgáltat.

we had allowed ourselves to become distracted on the way to the Crusade, never laid eyes on a Turk, turned to pillage and rapine among the Hungarians and Greeks in order to reach the East…all for the glory of God, of course, until defeated,

I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. "I am young", he said, "and stronger than he." He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating

College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life—literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain.

There are as many ways to make Hungarian goulash as there are cooks in Hungary. The dish’s origin was from the ninth century when Hungarian shepherds or gulyás threw in whatever they had to make stew. Some recipes call for beef, pork, veal, or lamb; some include pasta, and some don’t. Take your pick of other ingredients: vegetables, potatoes, beans, sauerkraut, wine; no two recipes are the same except they all have paprika.

The life of the hero of the tale is, at the outset, overshadowed by bitter and hopeless struggles; one doubts that the little swineherd will ever be able to vanquish the awful Dragon with the twelve heads. And yet, ...truth and courage prevail and the youngest and most neglected son of the family, of the nation, of mankind, chops off all twelve heads of the Dragon, to the delight of our anxious hearts. This exultant victory, towards which the hero of the tale always strives, is the hope and trust of the peasantry and of all oppressed peoples. This hope helps them bear the burden of their destiny.

He used his intellect as he used his legs: to carry him somewhere else. He studied astrology, astronomy, botany, chemistry, numerology, fortification, divination, organ building, metallurgy, medicine, perspective, the kabbala, toxicology, philosophy, and jurisprudence. He kept his interest in anatomy and did a dissection whenever he could get hold of a body. He learned Arabic, Catalan, Polish, Icelandic, Basque, Hungarian, Romany, and demotic Greek.

There I sat, in that great city, guiltless of crime, yet not daring to worship God in any of the churches. I heard the bells ringing for afternoon service, and, with contemptuous sarcasm, I said, "Will the preachers take for their text, 'Proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to them that are bound'? or will they preach from the text, 'Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you'?" Oppressed Poles and Hungarians could find a safe refuge in that city; John Mitchell was free to proclaim in the City Hall his desire for "a plantation well stocked with slaves;" but there I sat, an oppressed American, not daring to show my face. God forgive the black and bitter thoughts I indulged on that Sabbath day! The Scripture says, "Oppression makes even a wise man mad;" and I was not wise.

local rabbi, who had been seen talking to the Romanians and Hungarians earlier. However it came to pass, as the sun moved toward the horizon, the entire population of Atlit—nearly three hundred that day—gathered as a single congregation. They streamed toward the promenade, dragging benches, chairs, and wooden boxes through the dirt.

Grace Slaughter - the surname of her fifth husband, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical toners and "prophylactic" products, recently deceased due to a ruptured peritoneum - was sharply chauvinistic and would allow no more than two exceptions to her all-American views, exceptions with which her first spouse, Astolphe de Guéménolé-Longtgermain, no doubt had something to do: cooking had to be done by French nationals of male gender, laundry and ironing by British subjects of female gender (and absolutely not by Chinese). That allowed Henri Fresnel to be hired without having to hide his original citizenship, which is what had to be done by the director (Hungarian), the set designer (Russian), the choreographer (Lithuanian), the dancers (Italian, Greek, Egyptian), the scriptwriter (English), the librettist (Austrian), and the composer, a Finn of Bulgarian descent with a large dash of Romanian.

Мога да заявя, че няма по-мъчително, по-разочароващо нещо от това ден след ден да следиш, ден след ден да откриваш какво е унищожено в тебе.

A szerelem egyetlen feltétele: a Másik Félnek bele kell egyeznie, hogy szeressék. Nem könnyű dolog.

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943. Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.

Is not literature meant to speak of our being a thousand different kinds of things, at times creating even this diversity? If literature gives up this purpose, this duty, it renounces all claim to legitimacy. I am Hungarian. I am Slovene. I am Serbian. You do not need literature for sentences like that. A bureaucrat will do, and a rubber stamp. A border guard. An Army.

Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians?

I was weary of flying from pillar to post. I had been chased during half my life, and it seemed as if the chase was never to end. There I sat, in that great city, guiltless of crime, yet not daring to worship God in any of the churches. I heard the bells ringing for afternoon service, and, with contemptuous sarcasm, I said, "Will the preachers take for their text, 'Proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to them that are bound'? or will they preach from the text, 'Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you'?" Oppressed Poles and Hungarians could find a safe refuge in that city; John Mitchell was free to proclaim in the City Hall his desire for "a plantation well stocked with slaves"; but there I sat, an oppressed American, not daring to show my face.

When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge. You didn’t do anything wrong, he said, the world did something wrong, terribly wrong. This young man, he went to Budapest in the beginning of it all, and he saved Jews, he gave out passports of Sweden, and because the Hungarians didn’t know how to read Swedish, this was how my father was saved. And thousands of others too, with these pieces of paper. I am here to tell you that one man can make a difference, and that man can be you, any of you…

He speaks in a different language with a voice that's already like sand shifting over metal, and my insides flip out. He's inadvertently flicked some weird switch inside me, and there's no turning back once it's there. Apparently I really like hearing someone speak in Hungarian or Polish or Russian or whatever it is he's speaking, while trapped in a closet. I'm a secret subscriber to Trapped in a Polish Closet magazine.

the Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself. Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny—you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy.

for a moment now I reflected on the fact that, although Meredith Wittman and I both wanted to be writers, she was going about it by interning at a magazine, whereas I was sitting at this table in a Hungarian village trying to formulate the phrase “musically talented” in Russian, so I could say something encouraging by proxy to an off-putting child whose father had just punched him in the stomach. I couldn’t help thinking that Meredith Wittman’s approach seemed more direct.

Is it possible that power can conquer matter, that the soul makes a mightier truth than the body, that life has a meaning that survives life itself, that good survives evil as life survives death, that God, after all, is more powerful than the Devil?

These tales, without exception, express the truth that justice triumphs in the end. They all contain the idea that it is worth while to fight for the truth, in any situation. In this fight man is assisted by more powerful beings than ordinary mortals. And the triumph of justice is the only sense and consolation in this world. Indeed, the world itself started out with this hope. The human race received it long, long ago as a cradle-song.

There is a folk-tale about a shoemaker and his wife who were so poor that they had to send their many children out into the world to make a living. The lads went through many a perilous adventure but came home in the end, unscathed, to help their mother. They had always remembered their mother's advice and wise words; they often quoted them when they were in trouble, and in fact they recognized one another by them in foreign lands. The countless peoples of the world may be looked upon as so many children sent out into the world. They have gone through many adventures and hardships. They have drifted apart and fallen out with one another, on many occasions. They have failed to realize soon enough that they are brothers. But now it seems that they are beginning to realize this -- at least to the extent that they are able to get acquainted with each other's fundamental natures -- through their stories and songs.

Other terms used to describe the Putin regime were 'kleptocracy' and 'crony capitalism'---variations on Navalny's theme of the "Party of the Crooks and Thieves." A Hungarian sociologist named Balint Magyar rejected these terms because, he stressed, both 'kleptocracy' and 'crony capitalism' implied a sort of voluntary association---as though one could partake in the crony system or choose not to, and proceed with one's business autonomously, if less profitably. The fate of Khodorkovsky and the exiled oligarchs, as well as of untold thousands of jailed and bankrupted entrepreneurs, demonstrated that this was a fallacy.

In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished.

I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked rhetorically, "What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don't see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts. What would you call that?" And Bak looked over at me ironically and said, 'I'd call that life.

Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No

If I burst into a house and yell to all assembled, “Put on the kettle!” I have uttered an imperative English sentence, but some will probably infer that I would like to have a cup of tea or other hot beverage, while another may further surmise that I feel myself at home here, and may in fact be the occupant of this house. Yet another person present, a monoglot Hungarian, may infer only that I speak English, and so does whomever I am addressing (well, it sounds like English to her), while somebody really in the know will be instantly informed that I have decided after all to steam open that sealed envelope and surreptitiously read the letter inside in spite of the fact that it isn’t addressed to me; a crime is about to be committed. What semantic information can be gleaned from the event depends on what information the gleaner already has accumulated. Learning that somebody speaks English can be a valuable update to your world knowledge, a design improvement that may someday pay big dividends.

One of the most surprisingly controversial presidential decisions I made was to return the Crown of Saint Stephen to the people of Hungary. It was said to have been given by the Pope in the year 1000 to Stephen, the first king of Hungary, as a symbol of political and religious authority and was worn by more than fifty kings when they were vested with power. A distinctive feature was that the cross on top was bent. As Soviet troops invaded Hungary, toward the end of the Second World War, some Hungarians delivered to American troops the crown and other royal regalia, which were subsequently stored in Fort Knox alongside our nation’s gold. The Soviets still dominated Hungary when I announced my decision to return the crown. There was a furor among Hungarian-Americans and others, and I was denounced as accepting the subservience of the occupied nation. I considered the crown to be a symbol of the freedom and sovereignty of the Hungarian people. I returned it in January 1978, stipulating that the crown and insignia must be controlled by Hungarians, carefully protected, and made available for public display as soon as practicable. A duplicate of the crown was brought to The Carter Center as a gift for me in March 1998 and is on display in our presidential museum. Rosalynn and I led volunteers to build Habitat houses in Vác, Hungary, in 1996, and we were treated as honored guests of the government and escorted to the Hungarian National Museum to see the crown and the stream of citizens who were going past it, many of them reciting a prayer as they did so. We were told that more than 3 million people pay homage to the crown each year. A few years later it was moved to its permanent home, in the Hungarian Parliament Building.

In Transylvania it was memories of the Romanian revolt that stalked the Hungarian aristocratic imagination.. In Galicia it was memories of Tarnow that performed a similar service for the surviving Polish noble families. Both societies shared something of the brittle, sports-obsessed cheerfulness of the British in India - or indeed of Southerners in the pre-1861 United States. These were societies which could resort to any level of violence in support of racial supremacy. Indeed, an interesting global history could be written about the ferocity of a period which seems, very superficially, to be so 'civilized'. Southern white responses to Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in 1831, with Turner himself flayed, beheaded and quartered, can be linked to the British blowing rebel Indians to pieces from the mouths of cannons in 1857.

In 2012, a World Economic Forum analysis found that countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender. 33 But here’s an interesting quirk: countries with genderless languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) are not the most equal. Instead, that honour belongs to a third group, countries with ‘natural gender languages’ such as English. These languages allow gender to be marked (female teacher, male nurse) but largely don’t encode it into the words themselves. The study authors suggested that if you can’t mark gender in any way you can’t ‘correct’ the hidden bias in a language by emphasising ‘women’s presence in the world’. In short: because men go without saying, it matters when women literally can’t get said at all.

Elég idült idill ez, még hogyha idill is. A szíved az enyémmel nem kompatibilis. Bőrünkből szikra pattan, ha megfogod kezem. Nem illünk össze, drága, mit szépítsünk ezen. De gomblukunkat mégis egymás hiánya lakja, és elválásaink megannyi kis patakja a visszaérkezés tavába fut be, lásd. Elhagylak, s lépteim megint mögéd szegődnek. Mert nem szerettem én még senkit így előtted, és nem tudok utánad szeretni senki mást.

And John Nash, my mathematical hero, revolutionized analysis and geometry with the proof of three theorems in scarcely more than five years before succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia. There is a fine line, it is often said, between genius and madness. Neither of these concepts is well defined, however. And in the case not only of Grothendieck but also of Gödel and Nash, periods of mental derangement, so far from promoting mathematical productivity, actually precluded it. Innate versus acquired, a classic debate. Fischer, Grothendieck, Erdős, and Perelman were all Jewish. Of these, Fischer and Erdős were Hungarian. No one who is familiar with the world of science can have failed to notice how many of the most gifted mathematicians and physicists of the twentieth century were Jews, or how many of the greatest geniuses were Hungarian (many

Peter Drucker, in my view the father of modern management thinking, was also a master of the art of the graceful no. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian professor most well known for his work on “flow,” reached out to interview a series of creative individuals for a book he was writing on creativity, Drucker’s response was interesting enough to Mihaly that he quoted it verbatim: “I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th – for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative – I don’t know what that means…. I just keep on plodding…. I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours – productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”8 A true Essentialist, Peter Drucker believed that “people are effective because they say no.

When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards. You can’t throw them out— they and the nameplate and a few sample payroll stubs are proof to yourself that you once showed up at that building every day and solved complicated, utterly absorbing problems there; unfortunately, the problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day that already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to create the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity. But coterminously, while the problems you were paid to solve collapse, the nod of the security guard, his sign-in book, the escalator ride, the things on your desk, the site of colleagues’ offices, their faces seen from characteristic angles, the features of the corporate bathroom, all miraculously expand: and in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed.

Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels.

The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks”—including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that “to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate’ opponents.” Many of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own “alternative media” that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them….In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.

Have you ever heard the Hungarian national anthem? No? Good for you! I wouldn’t recommend it at all. Unless you are looking for inspiration for your suicide attempt. If it is not just an attempt but you are deadly serious about your suicide then I strongly recommend you not only read the lyrics but listen to the music too. The most mournful funeral song sounds jolly compared to it. Other nations have inspiring anthems like ‘God Save the Queen’ or the ‘La Marseillaise’ or ‘The StarSpangled Banner’, and their lyrics are about victory and proudness like ‘Russia – our sacred homeland, Russia – our beloved country’ or ‘Germany, Germany above everything, Above everything in the world!’ But what about the Hungarian anthem? It starts with ‘O Lord, bless the Hungarian’ and then follow eight long and painful stanzas about our ‘slave yoke’ and ‘funeral urn’ and ‘the corpses of our defeated army’ and ‘groans of death, weeping’ and finally it finishes with ‘Pity, O Lord, the Hungarians they who have suffered for all sins of the past and of the future!’ Yes, of the future too.

He knew everything. He knew at least a thousand Hungarian folk songs, all the words and tunes, he could handle Gypsies, give them instructions and keep them in order, check their familiarity with the flicker of an eyelid, then win their affection with a lordly, condescending, and yet fraternal-playful sidelong glance, he could call 'acsi' perfectly, shout at the first violin when he didn't strike up Csendesen, csak csendesen quietly enough and the cimbalonist when the padded sticks didn't make the steel strings thunder and rumble sufficiently in Hullamzo Balaton, he could kiss the viola player's pock-marked face, give the double bass a kick, break glasses and mirrors, drink wine, beer and marc brandy for three days on end out of tumblers, smack his lips at the site of cabbage soup and cold pork stew, take ages inspecting his cards (with relish, one eye closed), dance a quick csardas for a whole half-hour, urging and driving himself on to stamp and shout and toss his partner high in the air and catch her, light as a feather, with one arm: so, as I said, he could do everything that raises Man from his animal condition and makes him truly Man.

If an aristocrat became bankrupt he looked to the sunshine of royal providence [...] but when the nobility sank too low to qualify for royal notice, they became fraudsters, trading on the display of rank: the man would become a card-sharper or gigolo, while the woman sold herself. Actual work would have been unthinkable. It would have offended against the ancient order of things, which assigned that role to the middle classes and the peasantry. This concept is difficult to connect with our modern view of the world, but its very absurdity follows directly from the fact that everything in its old order was so firm and wonderful - with everything in its eternally appointed place and moving in fixed circles like the stars. There was no changing your lot in life at will: it was assigned to you forever, by birth. If you fell below your appointed station, you couldn't just swap it for another - you simply plummeted into the void.

The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

Ben had the most expressive face I’d ever seen. When he told a story, he dove into it, re-enacting each character with a new set of his jaw and cast of his brow. His eyes shone vibrantly, and every time he laughed, it showed in his whole body. Just watching him made me smile. I felt warm around him, and happy, and comfortable. I felt like flannel pajamas, hot cocoa, a teddy bear, and my favorite comedy on DVD. I felt like home. I loved Ben, that’s what I felt. It popped into my head, and I didn’t doubt it for a second. I loved Ben. Well that was settled then, wasn’t it? Then my eyes darted to Sage, and I noticed he wasn’t focused on Ben’s story either. He was watching me. He was watching me watch Ben, to be precise, leaning back on his elbows and staring so fixedly that I could practically hear him scratching his way into my brain to listen to what I was thinking. And the minute I felt that, I was desperate to take back what I’d thought, and make sure he hadn’t understood. Especially since I had this strong feeling that if he believed I loved Ben, he’d disappear. Maybe not right away, but as soon as he could. And that would be the end of the world. “Okay, Sage, your turn,” Rayna said. “What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done in the middle of a social function?” Instantly Sage’s intense stare was gone, replaced by a relaxed pose and a charming smile. “Um, I would say doing a spit take in front of Clea’s mom, several senators, and the Israeli foreign minister would probably cover it.” “You did that?” I asked. “Oh yes, he did,” Rayna nodded. “And the minister still offered you his house in Tel Aviv for the honeymoon? That’s shocking.” “Rayna is particularly charming,” Sage noted. “Thank you, darling.” She batted her eyes at him like a Disney princess. “What happened?” Ben asked. “Piri spiked your drink with garlic?” “You say that like it’s a joke,” Sage said. “I’m pretty sure she did.” “She must really have it out for you,” Ben said. “Palinka’s Hungarian holy water. You don’t mess with that.” “Speaking of holy water, I so did not get that on our trip,” Rayna put in. “Clea and I were touring one of the cathedrals in Italy, and in front of the whole tour I go, “That’s too cute! Look, they have birdbaths in the church!

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it— he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth. I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.

Apafi leült, mint valami áldozatra szánt bárány, s első kezdetnek akkora betűt kanyarított a pergamenre, hogy a török fölugrott ijedtében, s azt kérdte, hogy mi az. - Ez egy M betű - válaszolt Apafi. - De hát a többinek is hagyjon kend helyet. - Ez csak kezdőbetű, a többi majd apró lesz. - No hát mondja kegyelmed fennhangon, hogy mit ír. Apafi reszketve írt és mondá: - Minekutána… A basa elkapta előle dühösen a pergament, s ráordított: - Mit “minekutána” és “annakutána”! Mit cikornyázza kegyelmed. Írja kegyelmed úgy, ahogy szokás: “Mi Apafi Mihály, Erdély fejedelme, parancsoljuk neked, hitvány szolga, hogy amint e levelet veszed, legottan mielőttünk Kisselyk helységében megjelenni - fejed vesztésének büntetése alatt - el ne mulaszd.” Punktum. Apafinak nagy bajába került kapacitálhatni a basát arról, miszerint magyar nemesekkel nem szokás ilyen stílusban korrespondeálni: végre is annyit megengedett neki, hogy fogalmazza hát úgy a levelet, ahogy neki jobban tetszik, de tartalma határozott legyen és parancsoló.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.