They Were Counted Quotes

“Balint pondered the programme outlined by Slawata: centralization, rule by an Imperial Council, the ancient kingdom of Hungary reduced to an Austrian province, and national boundaries to be re-arranged statistically according to the ethnic origin of the inhabitants! Why all this? To what purpose? Slawata had given him the answer: Imperial expansion in the Balkans so that feudal kingdoms for the Habsburgs reached the Sea of Marmora; and it was all to be achieved with the blood of Hungarian soldiers and paid for by Hungarian tax-money! So it was merely to help Vienna spread Austrian hegemony over the nations of the Balkans that Tisza was to be helped to build up the Hungarian national armed forces.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“In the great world outside Hungary events were taking place that would change all their lives: the uprising in Russia, the dispute over Crete, the Kaiser Wilhelm’s ill-timed visit to Tangier, the revelation of Germany’s plans to expand its navy – but such matters were of no importance to the members of the Hungarian Parliament. Even events closer to home, such as the rabble-rousing speech of an Austrian politician in Salzburg urging revolt among the German-speaking minorities in northern Hungary, or the anonymous pamphlet, which appeared in Vienna and revealed the total unpreparedness of the Austro-Hungarian forces compared with those of the other European powers, went unnoticed in Budapest. Naturally when Apponyi made a speech in favour of Deszo Baffy’s proposal to limit the demand for Hungarian commands in the army to using Hungarian only in regimental matters, everyone listened and discussed it as if their very lives depended on it.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“Sin duda, era un diletante, pero muy refinado, por lo que, desde el punto de vista social, era una persona más agradable que un artista.”
― Miklós Bánffy, Los días contados

“Llevar anteojos era considerado pretencioso, era señal de ahorro, de trabajo serio, de una concepción moderna del mundo.”
― Miklós Bánffy, Los días contados

“off and”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“possible”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“fared”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“fooded”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“fame.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“trified.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“them with strips of resiny bark so that the fames”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“infamed”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“fight”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“fy”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“fask”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“It seemed now to Balint that both parties in Parliament were fighting instinctively, but without a clear understanding either of their motives or of the inevitable results of their policies and strategy. While Tisza battled to strengthen the army, he could have no inkling that, once strengthened, it would be used to suppress the very independence it was designed to assure – and when the opposition delayed the implementation of Tisza’s policy by petty arguments about shoulder-flashes and army commands, they were unaware that, inadvertently, they were providing ammunition for those very arguments that in the near future would threaten the integrity of the constitution.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“How simple everything could seem if one looked only at the figures, those cold statistics that took no account of people’s feelings and traditions. How much would be destroyed if men were to be treated as robots! What of the myriad of individual characteristics, passions, aspirations, triumphs and disappointments that together made one people different from another? How could anyone ignore all the different threads of experience that, over the centuries, had formed and deepened the differences that distinguished each nation?”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“How would anyone believe that any good was to be obtained by adding the Balkan states to the already unwieldy Dual Monarchy and so increasing the Empire to a hundred million souls with differing cultures and traditions? Of course armies could be recruited and young men could die, but great States evolved only through centuries of social tradition and mutual self-interest; they were not imposed by bayonets. To believe the contrary would be as mad as the folly which had put the Archduke Maximilian on the throne of Mexico.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“He felt that he had just quaffed an enchanted potion whose venom fanned flickering flames in his veins that burned away all sense of caution and for ever freed him of that restraint which his inner voice so often told him he must obey. Now he was once again that primeval being who knows only how to follow his instincts, the predator who seeks his mate and for whom no obstacle, law or convention will be allowed to obstruct the natural course of his desire, that animal in whom passion rages unchecked and who, if need be, will kill to achieve his object.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted

“A Balkán népeivel megnöveszteni a Monarchiát? Fölhizlalni vele százmilliós birodalommá, összehajtani egy karámba a legkülönbözőbb múltú és kultúrájú nemzeteket, és akkor azt hinni, hogy az erőt jelent, nem pedig gyöngeséget?! Ó, hogyne! Sok-sok katonát lehetne sorozni, de a dinasztiákat nem szuronyok tartják fönn, hanem százados hagyomány és társadalmi ezer meg ezer kapcsolat.”
― Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted