People From Budapest

"He liked the style, that wry gallows humor armed with the semblance of omniscience; a most serviceable style it was, the dialect of the initiated, protecting them from their disillusionments, their fears, their well-concealed childish hopes."

"Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate."

"Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz."

"Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end, otherwise we would go on living as if there were still something for us to continue (our stories, for example); that is, we would go on living in error."

"Writers complete their works, whether those be thousands of pages long or just a few laconic lines."

"Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life."

"If you’re a revolutionary, you shouldn’t have started a family."

"I had gotten into the habit of sleeping late because I had started to see that this was the only sensible way I could kill time."

"But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together."

"Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on."

"A person’s true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all."

"That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said."

"Anyone who wants something else is Jewish."

"There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution."

"I exist. Is this a life still? No, just vegetating. It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: nonexistentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence."

"Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot."

"I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing. Living their nonexistent lives. Or do they exit, and it’s me who doesn’t."

"Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long."

"I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!"

"Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?"

"But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile." "Why?" Jill inquired. "Because," Enrique reasoned, "one cant be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy."

""You mustn’t forget about your future, Enrique." "I’m living for the present, Dad." "Ah!" he waved that aside. "The present is just temporary." ‘ I boiled up. "I know," I burst out. ‘It only has to be accepted temporarily — temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die."

"If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life."

"There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward."

"Kertész has his eyes on the 20th century's varied efforts toward the liquidation of anything recognizable as human personality. "We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disease," B. decrees in one of many flashbacks. "Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character." … Fatelessness is an eerie and painful novel, shocking not for its by-now familiar subject matter, but for the tone of earnest goodwill with which the young narrator attempts to understand his situation. (In one passage he discovers fleas feasting on his open wounds and, despite his horror, considers the insects' hunger and concludes that, "taking everything into account, I could see it their way.") In 1990's excellent Kaddish for an Unborn Child — which, sadly, completes the slim triad of Kertész's works available in English — he explains (via B.) that "one's religious duty, totally independent of the crippling religions of crippling churches, is . . . understanding the world." And with brutal intellectual rigor, Kertész does his best, refusing to let the Holocaust be sacralized as some mythical exception that stands outside of history, or as an untouchable sinkhole of meaning. The Nazi genocide is not an inexplicable catastrophe for Kertész, it's a given, the channel through which the world must be understood. … Liquidation is a profoundly melancholy book, wrestling not just with the legacy of the Holocaust, but with the decades of authoritarianism and disappointment that followed. … Liquidation is at its core a book about writing, about trying to tell stories that resist being told."

"I believe in loyalty. When a woman reaches a certain age she likes, she should stick with it."

"What's the use of having a gorgeous outfit if you are not happy?"

"Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask for a moment of silence here in this chamber to remember our fallen colleague, my predecessor representing the San Francisco Peninsula in Congress, Leo Ryan, and to honor his work for justice and human rights."

"He got along with everyone and had a very jovial character that helped him play with a striking amount of joy and calmness. He had a great shot and he could accelerate very quickly, ... all-around skilled and above all explosive."

"There is not one Hungarian who would be left untouched by the death of Ferenc Puskás. The best-known Hungarian of the 20th century has left... Ferenc Puskás has left us, but "Puskás Öcsi" the legend will always stay with us."

"The man was a supertalent. I have lost a friend and quality player. That's how Puskás was as a person and a football player. He was one of the greatest players of all time but life, my friend, when you least expect it comes to an end."

"Puskás scared the hell out of goalkeepers from the 30-35 metre range. He did not just have a powerful shot, but precision as well. I thought he was a genius."

"Of all of us, he was the best. He had a seventh sense for soccer. If there were 1,000 solutions, he would pick the 1001st."

"Look at that little fat chap. We’ll murder this lot."

"I was with (Bobby) Charlton, (Denis) Law and Puskás, we were coaching in a football academy in Australia. The youngsters we were coaching did not respect him including making fun of his weight and age...We decided to let the guys challenge a coach to hit the crossbar 10 times in a row, obviously they picked the old fat one. Law asked the kids how many they thought the old fat coach would get out of ten. Most said less than five. Best said ten. The old fat coach stepped up and hit nine in a row. For the tenth shot he scooped the ball in the air, bounced it off both shoulders and his head, then flicked it over with his heel and cannoned the ball off the crossbar on the volley. They all stood in silence then one kid asked who he was, I replied, "To you, his name is Mr. Puskás"."

"I would be a liar if I said we were not pretty nervous on the day of the match. I was in my kit, hanging about in the corridor, when I saw the England inside-right [Ernie] Taylor, who wasn't very tall. I popped back into the dressing room and said to the others: 'Listen, we're going to be all right, they've got someone even smaller than me'."

""He had such control of the ball and so much skill. He could make long, accurate passes and could score goals". (Former BBC pundit Jimmy Hill)"

""He was a special player in his day without question. How that Hungary team didn't win the 1954 World Cup is beyond me". (Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson)"

"Although he was a famous footballer he seemed very normal compared to today's modern stars. He lived in a modest flat below ours and was very generous. He often brought home footballs from training for the kids in the block to play with."

""He had a roly poly physique but a wonderful left foot and he was a brilliant finisher. I would put Puskas in any list of all time greats". (Preston and England legend Sir Tom Finney)"

"Mannheim notes that utopia not only shares with ideology a noncongruence with reality, but that utopia offers a perspective critical of the given reality, thus exposing the gap between what is and an ideal of what should be. Utopia, in challenging the existing order, is always a projection into possible futures; whereas, ideology, in legitimating the existing order, is directed toward perpetuating the past. Utopia tends to be the tool of social groups seeking ascendancy; while ideology tends to be the tool of dominant groups seeking to assuage their own sense of failing and justify the inadequacy of the status quo. Ideology and utopia are about power."

"In Mannheim’s post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic conception of democratization, social machinery that is maximally emancipatory, both over time and at any given historical moment, comes into being in a sustainable way only in a permanently revolutionary situation. That situation is one in which groups negotiate for power in a manner that continuously brings new leadership into positions for influencing or making choices for the community. The political process that Mannheim advocates in response to Fascism admits and institutionalizes the need for perpetual instability and uncertainty in order to make freedom possible; without uncertainty, or what Iser calls indeterminacy, is no freedom. Mannheim's political process is a democratized version of Trotsky's idea of "permanent revolution"…"

"Mannheim established no school. His preferred literary form was the essay and, collectively, his works contain many inconsistencies and, in places, a certain vagueness. Mannheim, himself was clear about these characteristics but appealed to his readers to see in them a sign of the provisional and experimental nature of his thinking. Of all the classical sociologists, Mannheim is the one whose biography and mode of questioning connects him most directly to the problems of our own time. Although he formulated his politics in relation to a historical situation from which we feel increasingly distant, the questions he posed in the diagnosis of conflict, on the role of the intelligentsia, on education and on democratic planning remain as pertinent as ever."

"Mannheim also realized that the enlarged concept of ideology in Marxism raises a fundamental problem of knowledge. By denouncing something as "ideological," one takes an ideological position. Mannheim sees this as a spiritual and intellectual crisis in what is now a "Post-Marxist world". Our world is a polemical conflict between different worldviews, each labeling the other as "ideology." There are no criteria common to all with which to arbitrate the validity of one cultural perspective versus another. Even the class consciousness of the proletariat becomes one perspective among many."

"The general form of the total conception of ideology is being used by the analyst when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary's point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis. At the present stage of our understanding it is hardly possible to avoid this general formulation of the total conception of ideology, according to which the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character."

"As long as one does not call his own position into question but regards it as absolute, while interpreting his opponents' ideas as a mere function of the social positions they occupy, the decisive step forward has not yet been taken."

"The particular conception of ideology operates primarily with a psychology of interests, while the total conception uses a more formal functional analysis, without any reference to motivations, confining itself to an objective description of the structural differences in minds operating in different social settings. The former assumes that this or that interest is the cause of a given lie or deception. The latter presupposes simply that there is a correspondence between a given social situation and a given perspective, point of view, or apperception mass. In this case, while an analysis of constellations of interests may often be necessary it is not to establish causal connections but to characterize the total situation. Thus interest psychology tends to be displaced by an analysis of the correspondence between the situation to be known and the forms of knowledge."

"The particular conception of "ideology" makes its analysis of ideas on a purely psychological level. If it is claimed for instance that an adversary is lying, or that he is concealing or distorting a given factual situation, it is still nevertheless assumed that both parties share common criteria of validity — it is still assumed that it is possible to refute lies and eradicate sources or error by referring to accepted criteria of objective validity common to both parties. The suspicion that one's opponent is the victim of an ideology does not go so far as to exclude him from discussion on the basis of a common theoretical frame of reference. The case is different with the total conception of ideology. When we attribute to one historical epoch one intellectual world and to ourselves another one, or if a certain historically determined social stratum thinks in categories other than our own, we refer not to the isolated cases of thought-content, but to fundamentally divergent thought-systems and to widely differing modes of experience and interpretation."

"In general there are two distinct and separable meanings of the term "ideology" — the particular and the total. The particular conception of ideology is implied when the term denotes that we are sceptical of the ideas and representations advanced by our opponent. They are regarded as more or less conscious disguises of the real nature of a situation, the true recognition of which would not be in accord with his interests. These distortions range all the way from conscious lies to half-conscious and unwitting disguises; from calculated attempts to dupe others to self-deception. This conception of ideology, which has only gradually become differentiated from the common-sense notion of the lie is particular in several senses. Its particularity becomes evident when it is contrasted with the more inclusive total conception of ideology. Here we refer to the ideology of an age or of a concrete historico-social group, e.g. of a class, when we are concerned with the characteristics and composition of the total structure of the mind of this epoch or of this group. Although they have something in common, there are also significant differences between them."

"Whereas the particular conception of ideology designates only a part of the opponent's assertions as ideologies — and this only with reference to their content, the total conception calls into question the opponent's total Weltanschauung (including his conceptual apparatus), and attempts to understand these concepts as an outgrowth of the collective life of which he partakes."