Hungarians Quotes

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

The style of mustache I have is called a Hungarian, and you need a certain type of viscosity in the wax to make it work.

You know, Italian-Hungarian - no matter how linear and cool I look on the outside, I have all that energy trying to find its way through life.

'Zolten' is a common Hungarian name, it's my wife's maiden name and most importantly, it's the name of Dracula's dog.

Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He'll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

I am not 100% English, I am actually part Italian and even part Hungarian. Therefore I feel very much part of Europe both in my upbringing and outlook.

But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.

After studying the Hungarian language for years, I can confidently conclude that had Hungarian been my mother tongue, it would have been more precious. Simply because through this extraordinary, ancient and powerful language it is possible to precisely describe the tiniest differences and the most secretive tremors of emotions.

It’s not enough to have talent. You also have to be Hungarian.

The music we're playing now is based on my heritage, which is Russian, Romanian and Hungarian.

The first time I started listening to Irish music, I had a very strong connection. Strangely enough, there's a great many Japanese melodies and vocal styles that sound very much like Hungarian music. You start seeing all these cross-references and comparative, independent musical cultures.

I asked my grandmother how a Hungarian Jewish person can experience being Jewish. My grandmother answered was the only choice was to "keep quiet." I can understand her because she was a Holocaust survivor, and for her survival, she had to keep quiet. But I didn't obey my grandmother when I was a child, and in this case, I don't obey her either.

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

I grew up between the two world wars and received a rather solid general education, the kind middle class children enjoyed in a country whose educational system had its roots dating back to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.

During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.

They came to this country they, they were Hungarians, they were Communists from a Communist country. And right now those Hungarian freedom fighters can get jobs that student sit-ins can't get. They can go and sleep and live in hotels that Martin Luther King himself can't live in.They are recognized and respected because they are fighters, not because they are sit-iners or freedom.

The Hungarian ministry begged the king earnestly to issue orders to all troops and commanders of fortresses in Hungary, enjoining fidelity to the Constitution, and obedience to the ministers of Hungary.

My mother used to say: 'It's not enough to be Hungarian. You still need a little talent, too.' To paraphrase her, its not enough to be conservative, you still need to have the brainpower to be a Supreme Court justice. And, if Harriet Miers is confirmed, she likely won't be in the same league with her colleagues in terms of gray matter.

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 f-k all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

The claim made by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that the refugee question is a German problem is incorrect. It is a European problem.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If todayI lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I cook a little bit. I make a Hungarian dish called chicken paprikash that's out of this world. I'll give a heads-up to all of your readers that it doesn't have to be between Thai and Mexican every night. Toss some Hungarian in every once in a while. You will not be sorry. Good, solid peasant food.

In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.

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.

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.

The poor Americans are so busy defending the rights of Hindus in Pakistan, Moslems in India, Jews in Palestine, Koreans in Japan, Italians in Yugoslavia and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia that they simply cannot give a thought to Negroes in the United States.

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend. All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II. Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?

I come from a long line of tellers: mesemondok, old Hungarian women who tell while sitting on wooden chairs with their plastic pocketbooks on their laps, their knees apart, their skirts touching the ground... and cuentistas, old Latina women who stand, robust of breast, hips wide, and cry out the story ranchera style. Both clans storytell in the plain voice of women who have lived blood and babies, bread and bones. For them, story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.

I saw Brahms's Hungarian Rhapsody on television when I was two. Tom and Jerry were playing it together. I thought, 'Hey, if a cat can play like that, why can't I?'

In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people.

It's true, some senior Hungarian writers are not known for their laughter. There is a strong Germanic influence - an attitude that if it's enjoyable it can't possibly be literature.

I love the Dutch impressionists - Vermeer, Rembrandt. What they were able to do with light was astonishing. As for photographers, I think mostly of the Hungarians: Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jozsef Pesci. In fact, I have one of his photographs hanging in my house.

One of my proudest achievements is that when an authoritative book about Hungarian literature came out about a decade ago, there was a little article about me which said I was a Hungarian writer but pretending not to be. Bearing in mind I can hardly write a cheque in Hungarian, I was delighted to be included in the pantheon of Hungarian writers.

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.

I am critical of the fact that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is pulling out of everything - the joint approach to the refugee issue, for example. He cannot disparage his colleagues in the EU either - that's not how we treat each other. We require solidarity: in refugee policies, just as in the financial architecture of the structural funds from which countries like Hungary have strongly profited from for years.

Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,--not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us--the Irish!

I was so tired of the parts I had to play. There seems little for me in Hollywood, because, rather than real Chinese, producers prefer Hungarians, Mexicans, American Indians for Chinese roles.

Fashion is more about taste than money - you have to understand your body and tailor clothes to your needs; it's all about the fit. I do the alterations myself - I'm quite a seamstress - it's the influence of my Hungarian mother.

In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.

English was my fourth language. I arrived, I enrolled in public school, as a child, I believe I was about six years old when we finally landed in Michigan. And I was initially put in special education because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the English language because I was listening to Hungarian and Albanian and German. My mind broke down like I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fourth language.

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.

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.

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.

Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.

I was invited to join the newly established Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was able to establish a small research group in organic chemistry, housed in temporary laboratories of an industrial research institute.

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun.

It's a historical thing, up to the 19th century the English hated the French. Then in the 20th century the English started to hate the Germans - as we began to move alphabetically through the map of the world. Now, the year 2000, we are fine with the Germans... but the Hungarians are pissing us off.