Lukacs Quotes & Sayings

In general, I distrust philosophy. Plato recommended chasing poets from the city; the 'great' Heidegger was a Nazi; Lukacs was a communist; and J. P. Sartre wrote: 'Any anti-communist is a dog.' — Claude Simon

To American ears, the Filipino pronunciation of the word "evacuate" sounded more like "bokweet." They soon further Americanized it to "buckwheat," which would become guerilla slang meaning to place as much distance between oneself and the Japanese as possible. — John D. Lukacs

This feeling that
contrary to the consciously philosophic and historical conception which proclaims unceasing and peaceful progress
one is experiencing a last brief, irretrievable intellectual prime of humanity manifests itself in the greatest representatives of this period in different ways, in keeping with the unconscious character of this feeling. — Gyorgy Lukacs

Philosophy is transcendental homelessness; it is the urge to be at home everywhere — Gyorgy Lukacs

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook. — John Lukacs

But then history does not only consist of documents. — John Lukacs

Even one billion Chinese do not a superpower make. — John Lukacs

Kafka was a realist — Gyorgy Lukacs

We are all national socialists now. — John Lukacs

from Cicero: "To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain a child always. — John Lukacs

I am writing this because on that night of the tenth of May in the 1,940th year of Our Lord, Churchill stood for more than England. Millions of people, especially across Europe, recognized him now as the champion of their hopes. (In faraway Bengal India there was at least one man, that admirably independent writer and thinker, Nirad Chaudhuri, who fastened Churchill's picture on the wall of his room the next day.) Churchill was _the_ opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal, and new. — John Lukacs

When civilization is strong and widespread enough, "culture" will appear and take care of itself. — John Lukacs

Generalizations, like brooms, ought not to stand in a corner forever; they ought to sweep as a matter of course. — John Lukacs

In montage's original form as photomontage, it is capable of striking effects and on occasion it can even become a powerful political weapon. Such effects arise from its technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context. A good photomontage has the same effect as a good joke. — Gyorgy Lukacs

In our dreams we do not think differently, we remember differently. — John Lukacs

Science is the kind of sacred cow which theology was five hundred years ago ... — John Lukacs

From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not be known objectively for certain, because it is always possible that it will depend precisely on the individual, but this kind of thinking is also made impossible by the very essence of ethics, by conscience and the sense of responsibility. — Gyorgy Lukacs

It does not require much historical knowledge (though it may require a certain historical perspective) to see that many, if not all, of the "aristocratic" elements of the Constitution (as in other countries) have gradually disappeared or were washed away during the past two hundred years, while the monarchic powers of the presidency and the democratic extent of majority rule became more and more overwhelming. — John Lukacs

IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. — Gyorgy Lukacs

There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical current among bourgeois intellectuals. (1949) — Gyorgy Lukacs

Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or 'improve' it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism. — Gyorgy Lukacs

There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves, that they don't really believe what they say, that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men. — John Lukacs

Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and a cosmopolitan. But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism, too, is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from the community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years, but a populist will always remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe. — John Lukacs

All the nationalists are wasms - except one, the most powerful of this century, indeed, of the entire democratic age, which is nationalism. — John Lukacs

Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel's heroes: they are seekers. — Gyorgy Lukacs

from the fine American essayist Agnes Repplier: "I used to think that ignorance of history meant only a lack of cultivation and a loss of pleasure. Now I am sure that such ignorance impairs our judgment by impairing our understanding, by depriving us of standards or the power of contrast, and the right to estimate." And, "We can know nothing of any nation unless we know its history. — John Lukacs

The wistful term "transcendental homelessness" was coined by Georg Lukacs in
1916, in a little book called
The Theory of the Novel
. It refers to the longing of all souls
for the place in which they once belonged, and the "nostalgia ... for utopian perfection, a
nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality" (70). According to
Lukacs, everyone has a sense that he or she once belonged somewhere. However, this
place has been lost, and the purpose of human life is to once again find this place. The
search for this place of belonging, for the "home" that will once more fill life with
meaning, is the fundamental structure of the novel — Anonymous

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four , was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. — John Lukacs