Bryan > Bryan's Quotes

“I think television with two channels - one on a political speech, on the other a Russian film -- must be the cheapest and most inhuman means to effectively make people stupid.”
― Iva Pekárková, Truck Stop Rainbows

“Those at the top rely heavily on the fact that humanity forgets; that if there are no records, there is no past.”
― Iva Pekárková, Truck Stop Rainbows

“I've never collected souvenirs. But if I could, I'd save the white of beautiful nights in a little pouch on my chest, the way Indians keep the scents of the prairie.”
― Iva Pekárková, Truck Stop Rainbows

“God has punished a scoundrel, but the devil has drowned the rest.”
― Voltaire

“Wherever you go in France, you will find that their three chief occupations are making love, backbiting, and talking nonsense.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“For you, freedom means "leave me alone." For the masses, it means "give me a break.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play

“Defeatism means turning a disaster into a moral victory.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play

“Each morning I stare into my impending death as I do into my shaving mirror.”
― George Konrád, A Feast in the Garden

“I'd rather be honest than virtuous. Of virtue means the approval of my contemporaries for thinking what they think. I can do without virtue.”
― George Konrád, A Feast in the Garden

“Everyone is convinced that he is moral: at the center of the great hall of our consciousness, each of us sits in blossoming perfection.”
― George Konrád, A Feast in the Garden

“Frequent mists swirling across the countryside drifted between me and the populated land, so that the world was as it was on the fifth day of creation, when God was still undecided whether he should hand it over to Man.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“What had attracted, even infatuated me, about the communist movement was the feeling, however illusory, of being close to the 'helm of history.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“the young can't help but acting; they're immature, but they're placed in a mature world and have to act as if they were mature. So they put on whatever masks and disguises appeal to them and can be made to fit -- and thy act.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career.”
― Joseph Strayer, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men.”
― Tania Crasnianski, Children of Nazis: The Sons and Daughters of Himmler, Göring, Höss, Mengele, and Others-Living with a Fathers Monstrous Legacy

“And look at the National Socialists themselves – see how far they really live by National Socialist principles: for instance, the idea that the common good comes before the individual good. They ask ordinary people to observe that principle but have no intention of doing so themselves.”
― Wladyslaw Spielmann, The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45

“A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“The speed with which this transformation took place was, in retrospect, nothing short of astonishing. In the Soviet Union itself, the evolution of a totalitarian state had taken two decades, and it had proceeded in fits and starts. The Bolsheviks did not begin with a blueprint.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“Certain patterns were followed almost everywhere: first the elimination of “right-wing” or anticommunist parties, then the destruction of the noncommunist left, then the elimination of opposition within the communist party itself.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“From far away you could see the light ahead, a gleam that kept growing, and its brilliance seemed ever more dazzling to you huddled there in the dark the longer it took to reach it. But when at last the train burst out in the glorious sunshine, all you saw was a wasteland full of weeds and stones, and a heap of garbage.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“The scorn the Nazis held for all Eastern Europeans was closely related to their decision to take the Jews from all over Europe to the East for execution. There, in a land of subhumans, it was possible to do inhuman things.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“Though the looting fever eventually subsided in Poland and elsewhere, it may well have helped build tolerance for the corruption and theft of public property that were so common later on.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“Since then, many have tried to describe what it feels like to endure the disintegration of one’s entire civilization, to watch the buildings and landscapes of one’s childhood collapse, to understand that the moral world of one’s parents and teachers no longer exists and that one’s respected national leaders have failed.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Yet it is still not easy to understand for those who have not experienced it. Words like “vacuum” and “emptiness” when used about a national catastrophe such as an alien occupation are simply insufficient: they cannot convey the anger people felt at their prewar and wartime leaders, their failed political systems, their own “naïve” patriotism, and the wishful thinking of their parents and teachers. Widespread destruction—the loss of homes, families, schools—condemned millions of people to a kind of radical loneliness. Different parts of Eastern Europe experienced this collapse at different times and the experience was not everywhere identical. But whenever and however it came, national failure had profound effects, especially on young people, many of whom simply concluded that everything they had once thought true was false.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“Cities tend to reflect the character of their residents. Budapest is a dramatic, theatrical kind of place. More than anything else it resembles a stage set.”
― Kati Marton, Wallenberg: Missing Hero

“Buda, perched on steep hills, her sprawling Royal Palace, and her Citadel carved into jagged cliffs which plunge into the river, craves the attention of the visitor arriving down the Danube from Vienna. Pest, on the flat plain that is the continuation of the Puszta, is all business, commerce and intellect, all conversation and art. Fantastic amalgams of Romanesque, Gothic and Byzantine straining to find their Magyar soul face the boulevards, which are unabashed imitations of both Paris and Vienna. The Parliament, ostentatiously outdoing Westminster, spire for spire, Gothic arch for Gothic arch, faces the dirty, gray Danube, the heart of the city.”
― Kati Marton, Wallenberg: Missing Hero

“The riddle that was making the rounds was: “What is the difference between Hitler and Chamberlain? Answer: Chamberlain takes his weekend in the country. Hitler takes his country in the weekend.”
― Kati Marton, Wallenberg: Missing Hero

“The Soviet state, like any other giant enterprise, is, above all, a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats do not, as a whole, like to make decisions. Decisions require a degree of courage and responsibility, qualities in short supply among public servants on both sides of the Great Divide.”
― Kati Marton, Wallenberg: Missing Hero

“One of my favorite Hungarian writers, Kálmán Mikszáth (KAHL-mahn MEEK-saht), posed the question in a late-19th century story called Beszterce ostroma (The Siege of Beszterce) that while everyone admires men who were born before their time, what is to be done with a man who is born centuries after his time?”
― Tomek Jankowski, Eastern Europe!, 2nd Edition: Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does