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Prague Quotes

Browse 42 quotes about Prague.

Prague Quotes

“I’ll find my group one day. Friends I belong with, a city, a community, a place to get all those ideas out and let them be heard and appreciated. I’ll be something one day. I know I will.
 For now I’m walking lonely in Prague at Christmas, feeling like the happiest, most unknown girl in the world.”

HomeLostCommunityTravelLonelyChristmasAloneBelongingNomadPrague
Book:He loved me some days. I'm sure he did: 99 essays on growth through loss
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“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”

PoliticsHistoryHumourCommitmentPoliceLoyaltyRussiaCommunismGenerosityIronyBoredomCharmMediocrityBureaucracyExileDissentTotalitarianismAllegianceMoscowArgumentsDetention1968KafkaGorbachevCzechoslovakiaArrestNelson MandelaPrague1950s1970s1980sCliches1988Vaclav HavelBad CrowdsCharter 77Zdenek Mlynar
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“We also learned our own history and I was so grateful that such richness comes from our family stories. Now we will forever remember the day that a Russian cellist spoke the heart of Czech people. Rostropovich loved Prague and so he viewed that performance as a personal tragedy.”

CzechCzechoslovakiaPragueCelloRostropovich
Book:CELLOGIRLS: Identity and Transformation in 2CELLOS Fan Culture
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“We are hardly the first victims of perfidious Soviet policy, which has, already several times in history, placed the interests of power of the Greater Russian Empire— which is probably the most suitable name for the true essence of the complicated little internal Soviet unions— above all the interests of proletarian internationalism. What was the annexation of the Baltic peoples, the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians? To this day, he hatred these nations feel for the Russians is so great that a European [sic] cannot even comprehend it. Mladý svět (Young World), special edition no. 4, 26 August 1968”

World HistoryInvasion1968CzechoslovakiaPragueRussian ImperialismCzech Quotes
Book:Invasion 68: Prague
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“The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.”

CitiesLushPragueEvocative
Book:Daughter of Smoke & Bone
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“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”

ReligionAtheismSecurityIndiaSalvationIslamIraqDebateGermanyTemplesMiddle EastShakespearePolandNormalityAncestorsJewsEastern EuropeIstanbulEinsteinAntisemitismMoroccoSpinozaTunisiaPragueMarilyn MonroeBudapestJewishnessEritreaArthur MillerKurdish PeopleSynagoguesDesecrationDamascusJewish QuestionMartin AmisRabbisReligious ConversionDavid RieffAnnie NavaskyBar And Bat MitzvahBest ManRobert GoldburgSteve WassermanVictor Saul Navasky
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Regarding 'Ferris Bueller,' I was in the Czech Republic once, in Prague, making a movie at the same time as Jeffrey Jones, who played the principal, who was making a different movie. The Super Bowl was going to be playing at this bar at midnight, so we decided we would go watch the Super Bowl at this bar at midnight in Prague together.”

DifferentTogetherWatchesDecidedBarsRepublicBowlsPrincipalMidnightSuper BowlCzechPragueCzech RepublicFerris Bueller
Author:Edie McClurg
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“Prague is not, strictly speaking, travel writing but it is, among other things, an excellent example of what travel writing is becoming, if indeed it hasn't already done so. . . . People are no longer so easily satisfied by the mere travel impressions of some outsider much like themselves. Instead they gravitate towards writers who actually have lived not simply in, but inside, a location for an extended period, as one lives inside one's clothes.”

PeopleIfsWritingDoneExampleBecomingPeriodsClothesMereImpressionSatisfiedExcellentOutsidersLocationTravel WritingPrague
Author:George Fetherling
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“In Moscow, dim and green under the summer rain, columns of armour were waiting in the side-roads off the long avenue from Vnukovo airport. Tanks from the Taman Division stood beneath the dripping trees around Moscow University with their field kitchens and command trucks. This was not a new sight to me: the Soviet tanks had rested like that beneath the trees of the parks in Prague, late in another August twenty-three years before. Now they had invaded and crushed one more country -- their own.”

YearsLongCountryThreeWaitingSidesTreeFieldsLateSummerRainSightTwentiesGreenUniversityCommandKitchenParksDivisionSovietThree YearsTruckAirportsAvenuesTanksCrushedColumnsAugustMoscowDrippingArmourPragueSummer Rain
Author:Neal Ascherson
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“The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.”

MadeSelfSometimesLastsAmericaChoicesCultureSinCitiesFantasyGrewComfortTasteApproachPicksHollywoodMade ItDeceptionFrontiersAmerican CultureVegasLas VegasVisionariesSelf DeceptionAmbiguousReinventionQuintessentialProminencePraguePeoria
Author:Hal Rothman
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“The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.”

FirstsWellsStatesTogetherUnitedUnited StatesEconomicMilitaryEventsCreationNeededFirst TimeEuropeOrganizationWesternCommittedProtectionDefenseConvincedAssistanceRequestBerlinTreatiesWestern EuropePragueBlockades
Author:John Lewis
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“When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece.”

WritingFirstsDoeUseHappensNamesEasyPiecesOne DayCommunistRegimes80sWhatever HappensCzechoslovakiaPrague
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born.”

BeliefLeftFeltBornUnitedSeeingCatholicTerrorBelieverEmpiresPriestsSolidarityTotalitarianismPersecutedBelief In GodFraternityCzechPrague
Author:Milan Kundera
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“I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of postgraduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but I was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.”

PeopleWayYearsPoliticalUnderstandingPrinciplesStudyEconomicMonthsSixSpringEconomicsThirdsWesternCriticalGladPostsLiberalismGraduatesSix MonthsPursuedTextbooksHayekNaplesCzechoslovakiaDoctoratesPrague
Author:Vaclav Klaus
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“Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of roughhewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul.”

WorldHumansChildrenTwoSoulLightEyeTodayJoyHeavenLaughingFireGenerationsElementsEternityWoodsSymbolsRoughRitualWearyGypsyUnnoticedNomadWanderersHuman ThoughtPedestriansPrague
Author:Bohumil Hrabal
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“In Rome, I really wanted an Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday experience, but the Trevi Fountain was crowded, there was a McDonald's at the base of the Spanish Steps, and the ruins smelled like cat pee because of all the strays. The same thing happened in Prague, where I'd been yearning for some of the bohemianism of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But no, there were no fabulous artists, no guys who looked remotely like a young Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw this one mysterious-looking guy reading Sartre in a cafe, but then his cell phone rang and he started talking in aloud Texan twang.”

WantedYoungArtistGuyReadingTalkingStepsSawsHappenedCatPhonesMysteriousRuinsCellsHolidayRomeYearningFabulousFountainUnbearableCrowdedCell PhoneMcdonaldsLightnessCafesTexanUnbearable Lightness Of BeingHepburnAudreyUnbearable LightnessPragueDaniel Day Lewis
Book:Just One Day
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“Let me tell you how at one time the famous mathematician Euclid became a physician. It was during a vacation, which I spent in Prague as I most always did, when I was attacked by an illness never before experienced, which manifested itself in chilliness and painful weariness of the whole body. In order to ease my condition I took up Euclid's Elements and read for the first time his doctrine of ratio, which I found treated there in a manner entirely new to me. The ingenuity displayed in Euclid's presentation filled me with such vivid pleasure, that forthwith I felt as well as ever.”

FirstsWellsWholeBodyPainScienceOrderFoundFeltPleasureConditionsElementsFirst TimeLet MeFilledPainfulIllnessDoctrineTreatedRecoveryEaseOne TimeVacationPhysiciansMathematicianBiographiesChillVividPresentationIngenuityWearinessRatiosEuclidPrague
Author:Bernard Bolzano
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“The solution was eventually found by Johannes Gutenberg, who made the breakthrough that finally established printing as the communication technology of the future. Similar ideas may have been under development around the same time in Prague and Haarlem. But in business, the key question is not about who else is in the race, it's about who gets there first. Johannes Gutenberg was the first to make the new technology work, ensuring his place in any history of the human race.”

FirstsHumansMayHas BeensMadeIdeasFoundRaceTechnologyCommunicationKeysDevelopmentSolutionsEconomicsHuman RaceBreakthroughPrintingNew TechnologyPragueCommunication TechnologyGutenberg
Author:Alister E. McGrath
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“When I sang my American folk melodies in Budapest, Prague, Tiflis, Moscow, Oslo, or the Hebrides or on the Spanish front, the people understood and wept or rejoiced with the spirit of the songs. I found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mine, they understand each other in the common language of work, suffering, and protest.”

PeopleHas BeensSpiritSufferingSongFoundLanguageForceCommonFrontsMinesSingingPicksUnderstoodFolksProtestMelodyCottonMoscowCommon LanguagePragueBudapestOslo
Book:Paul Robeson speaks: writings, speeches, interviews, 1918-1974
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“My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers... They say, 'We came to liberate you....' I say: 'Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.' They say: 'No. We never... no shooting. No. No.' So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, 'Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.' And they have to believe me.”

PeopleThinkingBelieveI CanDifferentSometimesShowsSawsHappenedPhotographyPhotographerPhotographSoldierProofRussiaShootingBelieve In MeExesPrague
Author:Josef Koudelka
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