Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"...the very ground of my complaint is that no polity of today is worthy of the philosophical nature." - anticipates Hegelian and Marxist arguments that perfect man will only come into being in perfect society.

"...of those who turn to philosophy...the majority become cranks, not to say rascals." - seems fair, especially given the mystical flavour of Plato's philosophy.

"Only the colours of their uniform had changed' - is there any research on this? Because it is at odds with his Jewish Police Colonel anecdote.

"But he didn't want to play the patriot; rather he wanted - once in his life - to have played in the Emre the song that spoke of Hungary as being his native land as well - even if he, the Jewish whose mother tongue was Hungarian, whose closest kin were killed, who was humiliated and hounded to death, was deprived of property and rights by Hungarian society."

""The Commission of Human Rights was already established, but no one said a word about the Commission of Human Duties."

"During the months of inflation...the vast majority of humans passed through more dreary and harrowing physical hardships than during the siege,"

"In the end, eberuthing was taken sway from everyone. So the question of taxation was finally solved more fundamentally in Hungary than in the West."

"But merchants, who somehow made it home from the concentration camps or staggered out of a cellar, had by morning raised their shutters, obtained and sold merchandise."

...And this was the crux of the problem, for the inhabitants of Castle Hill in Buda ...forgot to pay their taxes."

" - everyone knew that his personal good fortune and the future of his dependents, every vital interest depended lock, stock and barrel at least as much on the landowner as on the power of the state."

"They "journey to the dead" took place, I believe, in these pages. The 'return Home' cannot, because I no longer have a home."

"Possibly everyone is guilty, the entire human race. For this reason, it is best to win, because the Victor gains a statue. The one who loses is hanged or hauled off to Yekaterinburg." - and treat those two importers just the same?

"Not a single Hungarian writer could make a living on the income from his books." - a small market

"They knew that translating is like an undertaking in which someone deciphers a secret writing, a code."

"I continually quarrelled with this class, this bourgeoisie. I, the bourgeois offspring of Upper Hungary, never felt at home in that bourgeois house and in that sphere of activity in Buda which now vanished amid the ruins. What was it I felt was missing?"

"Goethe said..." - Stalin's "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic" is a paraphrase of this?

"I have felt at other times, too, that in life's critical situations an invisible hand, selecting fatefully, puts that reading into our hands which [] responds to the problems of the particular moment."

"...it didn't matter if someone was an "ace worker" twenty years before. What always counted in the Soviet system was whether it could use a human being, the raw material, today, Thursday, 4:30 p.m. "

"It is good because if you are a writer, then you can tell us what we are thinking," - cf Joyce, Portrait...

"Unless...philosophers become kings" - he's really cranking this up now!

" awe restraining him from laying hands on one who may be his parent" - he didn't have kids, did he, Plato?

"because they have nothing in private possession but their bodies" - Plato, an utterly fruitcake, or a Swiftian refuting rationalism in politics.

Plato's views on the demographic management of the guardian caste are horrific, and obviously a deep source of inspiration to Aldous Huxley in both Brave New World and Ape and Essence.

"For the production of a female guardian, then , our education will not be one thing for men and another for women, especially since the nature which we hand over to it is the same." - Plato opts for selective co-education.

"The interference with one another's business, then, of three classes, and the substitution of the one for the other, is the greatest injury to state..." - caste system.

The Renaissance and Reformation as responses to Invasion. ???

"I am a National Socialist," he shouted. "You" - he he pointed at me at me - "can't understand this because you are talented. But I am not, and that is why I need National Socialism."

"I never bought any furniture; everything we owned was inherited from the estates of our two families." - strange conception of middle class being used here.

"I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you."

"This is the thing about redheads, isn't? No matter how long you've lived with them, you're always surprised when they turn and look you straight at you."