| Recorded at | March 03, 2007 |
|---|---|
| Event | TED2007 |
| Duration (min:sec) | 18:40 |
| Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
| Words per minute | 199.61 fast |
| Readability (FK) | 57.07 medium |
| Speaker | Bernie Dunlap |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
Wofford College president Bernie Dunlap tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught him about passionate living and lifelong learning.
| 1 | 00:18 | "Jó napot, pacák" Which, as somebody here must surely know, | ||
| 2 | 00:24 | means "What's up, guys?" in Magyar, | ||
| 3 | 00:27 | that peculiar non-Indo-European language spoken by Hungarians | ||
| 4 | 00:30 | for which, given the fact that cognitive diversity is | ||
| 5 | 00:33 | at least as threatened as biodiversity on this planet, | ||
| 6 | 00:36 | few would have imagined much of a future even a century or two ago. | ||
| 7 | 00:40 | But there it is: "Jó napot, pacák" | ||
| 8 | 00:42 | I said somebody here must surely know, because | ||
| 9 | 00:46 | despite the fact that there aren't that many Hungarians to begin with, | ||
| 10 | 00:49 | and the further fact that, so far as I know, there's not a drop | ||
| 11 | 00:52 | of Hungarian blood in my veins, at every critical juncture of my life | ||
| 12 | 00:56 | there has been a Hungarian friend or mentor there beside me. | ||
| 13 | 01:00 | I even have dreams that take place in landscapes | ||
| 14 | 01:02 | I recognize as the landscapes of Hungarian films, | ||
| 15 | 01:06 | especially the early movies of Miklos Jancso. | ||
| 16 | 01:09 | So, how do I explain this mysterious affinity? | ||
| 17 | 01:13 | Maybe it's because my native state of South Carolina, | ||
| 18 | 01:18 | which is not much smaller than present-day Hungary, | ||
| 19 | 01:21 | once imagined a future for itself as an independent country. | ||
| 20 | 01:24 | And as a consequence of that presumption, | ||
| 21 | 01:26 | my hometown was burned to the ground by an invading army, | ||
| 22 | 01:30 | an experience that has befallen many a Hungarian town and village | ||
| 23 | 01:34 | throughout its long and troubled history. | ||
| 24 | 01:37 | Or maybe it's because when I was a teenager back in the '50s, | ||
| 25 | 01:40 | my uncle Henry -- having denounced the Ku Klux Klan | ||
| 26 | 01:43 | and been bombed for his trouble and had crosses burned in his yard, | ||
| 27 | 01:47 | living under death threat -- took his wife and children to Massachusetts for safety | ||
| 28 | 01:51 | and went back to South Carolina to face down the Klan alone. | ||
| 29 | 01:54 | That was a very Hungarian thing to do, | ||
| 30 | 01:57 | as anyone will attest who remembers 1956. | ||
| 31 | 02:01 | And of course, from time to time Hungarians | ||
| 32 | 02:04 | have invented their own equivalent of the Klan. | ||
| 33 | 02:06 | Well, it seems to me that this Hungarian presence in my life | ||
| 34 | 02:13 | is difficult to account for, but ultimately I ascribe it to an admiration | ||
| 35 | 02:19 | for people with a complex moral awareness, | ||
| 36 | 02:22 | with a heritage of guilt and defeat matched by defiance and bravado. | ||
| 37 | 02:27 | It's not a typical mindset for most Americans, | ||
| 38 | 02:30 | but it is perforce typical of virtually all Hungarians. | ||
| 39 | 02:34 | So, "Jó napot, pacák!" | ||
| 40 | 02:36 | I went back to South Carolina after some 15 years amid the alien corn | ||
| 41 | 02:41 | at the tail end of the 1960s, | ||
| 42 | 02:44 | with the reckless condescension of that era | ||
| 43 | 02:47 | thinking I would save my people. | ||
| 44 | 02:49 | Never mind the fact that they were slow to acknowledge they needed saving. | ||
| 45 | 02:53 | I labored in that vineyard for a quarter century before | ||
| 46 | 02:56 | making my way to a little kingdom of the just in upstate South Carolina, | ||
| 47 | 03:00 | a Methodist-affiliated institution of higher learning called Wofford College. | ||
| 48 | 03:04 | I knew nothing about Wofford | ||
| 49 | 03:06 | and even less about Methodism, | ||
| 50 | 03:08 | but I was reassured on the first day that I taught at Wofford College | ||
| 51 | 03:12 | to find, among the auditors in my classroom, | ||
| 52 | 03:14 | a 90-year-old Hungarian, surrounded by a bevy of middle-aged European women | ||
| 53 | 03:21 | who seemed to function as an entourage of Rhinemaidens. | ||
| 54 | 03:23 | His name was Sandor Teszler. | ||
| 55 | 03:26 | He was a puckish widower whose wife and children were dead | ||
| 56 | 03:30 | and whose grandchildren lived far away. | ||
| 57 | 03:33 | In appearance, he resembled Mahatma Gandhi, | ||
| 58 | 03:36 | minus the loincloth, plus orthopedic boots. | ||
| 59 | 03:39 | He had been born in 1903 in the provinces | ||
| 60 | 03:43 | of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, | ||
| 61 | 03:45 | in what later would become Yugoslavia. | ||
| 62 | 03:48 | He was ostracized as a child, not because he was a Jew -- | ||
| 63 | 03:51 | his parents weren't very religious anyhow -- | ||
| 64 | 03:52 | but because he had been born with two club feet, | ||
| 65 | 03:55 | a condition which, in those days, required institutionalization | ||
| 66 | 04:00 | and a succession of painful operations between the ages of one and 11. | ||
| 67 | 04:04 | He went to the commercial business high school as a young man | ||
| 68 | 04:07 | in Budapest, and there he was as smart as he was modest | ||
| 69 | 04:12 | and he enjoyed a considerable success. And after graduation | ||
| 70 | 04:15 | when he went into textile engineering, the success continued. | ||
| 71 | 04:18 | He built one plant after another. | ||
| 72 | 04:20 | He married and had two sons. He had friends in high places who | ||
| 73 | 04:23 | assured him that he was of great value to the economy. | ||
| 74 | 04:26 | Once, as he had left instructions to have done, | ||
| 75 | 04:31 | he was summoned in the middle of the night by the night watchman at one of his plants. | ||
| 76 | 04:34 | The night watchman had caught an employee who was stealing socks -- | ||
| 77 | 04:39 | it was a hosiery mill, and he simply backed a truck up to the loading dock | ||
| 78 | 04:42 | and was shoveling in mountains of socks. | ||
| 79 | 04:43 | Mr. Teszler went down to the plant and confronted the thief and said, | ||
| 80 | 04:47 | "But why do you steal from me? If you need money you have only to ask." | ||
| 81 | 04:52 | The night watchman, seeing how things were going and waxing indignant, | ||
| 82 | 04:56 | said, "Well, we're going to call the police, aren't we?" | ||
| 83 | 04:58 | But Mr. Teszler answered, "No, that will not be necessary. | ||
| 84 | 05:01 | He will not steal from us again." | ||
| 85 | 05:03 | Well, maybe he was too trusting, because he stayed where he was | ||
| 86 | 05:08 | long after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria | ||
| 87 | 05:10 | and even after the arrests and deportations began in Budapest. | ||
| 88 | 05:15 | He took the simple precaution of having cyanide capsules placed in lockets | ||
| 89 | 05:19 | that could be worn about the necks of himself and his family. | ||
| 90 | 05:22 | And then one day, it happened: he and his family were arrested | ||
| 91 | 05:26 | and they were taken to a death house on the Danube. | ||
| 92 | 05:29 | In those early days of the Final Solution, it was handcrafted brutality; | ||
| 93 | 05:33 | people were beaten to death and their bodies tossed into the river. | ||
| 94 | 05:37 | But none who entered that death house had ever come out alive. | ||
| 95 | 05:41 | And in a twist you would not believe in a Steven Spielberg film -- | ||
| 96 | 05:45 | the Gauleiter who was overseeing this brutal beating was the very same thief | ||
| 97 | 05:50 | who had stolen socks from Mr. Teszler's hosiery mill. | ||
| 98 | 05:54 | It was a brutal beating. And midway through that brutality, | ||
| 99 | 05:59 | one of Mr. Teszler's sons, Andrew, looked up and said, | ||
| 100 | 06:02 | "Is it time to take the capsule now, Papa?" | ||
| 101 | 06:05 | And the Gauleiter, who afterwards vanishes from this story, | ||
| 102 | 06:09 | leaned down and whispered into Mr. Teszler's ear, | ||
| 103 | 06:12 | "No, do not take the capsule. Help is on the way." | ||
| 104 | 06:15 | And then resumed the beating. | ||
| 105 | 06:17 | But help was on the way, and shortly afterwards | ||
| 106 | 06:19 | a car arrived from the Swiss Embassy. | ||
| 107 | 06:22 | They were spirited to safety. They were reclassified as Yugoslav citizens | ||
| 108 | 06:26 | and they managed to stay one step ahead of their pursuers | ||
| 109 | 06:29 | for the duration of the War, surviving burnings and bombings | ||
| 110 | 06:33 | and, at the end of the War, arrest by the Soviets. | ||
| 111 | 06:35 | Probably, Mr. Teszler had gotten some money into Swiss bank accounts | ||
| 112 | 06:39 | because he managed to take his family first to Great Britain, | ||
| 113 | 06:43 | then to Long Island and then to the center of the textile industry in the American South. | ||
| 114 | 06:47 | Which, as chance would have it, was Spartanburg, South Carolina, | ||
| 115 | 06:51 | the location of Wofford College. | ||
| 116 | 06:53 | And there, Mr. Teszler began all over again and once again achieved immense success, | ||
| 117 | 06:59 | especially after he invented the process | ||
| 118 | 07:01 | for manufacturing a new fabric called double-knit. | ||
| 119 | 07:04 | And then in the late 1950s, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, | ||
| 120 | 07:11 | when the Klan was resurgent all over the South, | ||
| 121 | 07:14 | Mr. Teszler said, "I have heard this talk before." | ||
| 122 | 07:18 | And he called his top assistant to him and asked, | ||
| 123 | 07:23 | "Where would you say, in this region, racism is most virulent?" | ||
| 124 | 07:26 | "Well, I don't rightly know, Mr. Teszler. I reckon that would be Kings Mountain." | ||
| 125 | 07:31 | "Good. Buy us some land in Kings Mountain | ||
| 126 | 07:35 | and announce we are going to build a major plant there." | ||
| 127 | 07:37 | The man did as he was told, and shortly afterwards, | ||
| 128 | 07:40 | Mr. Teszler received a visit from the white mayor of Kings Mountain. | ||
| 129 | 07:44 | Now, you should know that at that time, | ||
| 130 | 07:47 | the textile industry in the South was notoriously segregated. | ||
| 131 | 07:50 | The white mayor visited Mr. Teszler and said, | ||
| 132 | 07:54 | "Mr. Teszler, I trust you’re going to be hiring a lot of white workers." | ||
| 133 | 07:57 | Mr. Teszler told him, "You bring me the best workers that you can find, | ||
| 134 | 08:01 | and if they are good enough, I will hire them." | ||
| 135 | 08:03 | He also received a visit from the leader of the black community, | ||
| 136 | 08:08 | a minister, who said, "Mr. Teszler, I sure hope you're going to | ||
| 137 | 08:10 | hire some black workers for this new plant of yours." | ||
| 138 | 08:12 | He got the same answer: "You bring the best workers that you can find, | ||
| 139 | 08:16 | and if they are good enough, I will hire them." | ||
| 140 | 08:19 | As it happens, the black minister did his job better than the white mayor, | ||
| 141 | 08:22 | but that's neither here or there. | ||
| 142 | 08:23 | Mr. Teszler hired 16 men: eight white, eight black. | ||
| 143 | 08:27 | They were to be his seed group, his future foremen. | ||
| 144 | 08:30 | He had installed the heavy equipment for his new process | ||
| 145 | 08:33 | in an abandoned store in the vicinity of Kings Mountain, | ||
| 146 | 08:36 | and for two months these 16 men would live and work together, | ||
| 147 | 08:39 | mastering the new process. | ||
| 148 | 08:40 | He gathered them together after an initial tour of that facility | ||
| 149 | 08:44 | and he asked if there were any questions. | ||
| 150 | 08:46 | There was hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet, | ||
| 151 | 08:48 | and then one of the white workers stepped forward and said, | ||
| 152 | 08:53 | "Well, yeah. We’ve looked at this place and there's only one place to sleep, | ||
| 153 | 08:56 | there's only one place to eat, there's only one bathroom, | ||
| 154 | 08:59 | there's only one water fountain. Is this plant going to be integrated or what?" | ||
| 155 | 09:05 | Mr. Teszler said, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other textile workers in this region | ||
| 156 | 09:10 | and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?" | ||
| 157 | 09:14 | "No, I reckon I don't." | ||
| 158 | 09:15 | And two months later when the main plant opened | ||
| 159 | 09:19 | and hundreds of new workers, white and black, | ||
| 160 | 09:21 | poured in to see the facility for the first time, | ||
| 161 | 09:23 | they were met by the 16 foremen, white and black, standing shoulder to shoulder. | ||
| 162 | 09:29 | They toured the facility and were asked if there were any questions, and | ||
| 163 | 09:33 | inevitably the same question arose: | ||
| 164 | 09:34 | "Is this plant integrated or what?" | ||
| 165 | 09:36 | And one of the white foremen stepped forward and said, | ||
| 166 | 09:39 | "You are being paid twice the wages of any other workers | ||
| 167 | 09:43 | in this industry in this region and this is how we do business. | ||
| 168 | 09:47 | Do you have any other questions?" | ||
| 169 | 09:49 | And there were none. In one fell swoop, | ||
| 170 | 09:53 | Mr. Teszler had integrated the textile industry in that part of the South. | ||
| 171 | 09:57 | It was an achievement worthy of Mahatma Gandhi, | ||
| 172 | 10:00 | conducted with the shrewdness of a lawyer and the idealism of a saint. | ||
| 173 | 10:04 | In his eighties, Mr. Teszler, having retired from the textile industry, | ||
| 174 | 10:10 | adopted Wofford College, | ||
| 175 | 10:12 | auditing courses every semester, | ||
| 176 | 10:14 | and because he had a tendency to kiss anything that moved, | ||
| 177 | 10:18 | becoming affectionately known as "Opi" -- which is Magyar for grandfather -- | ||
| 178 | 10:22 | by all and sundry. Before I got there, the library of the college | ||
| 179 | 10:26 | had been named for Mr. Teszler, and after I arrived in 1993, | ||
| 180 | 10:31 | the faculty decided to honor itself by naming Mr. Teszler Professor of the College -- | ||
| 181 | 10:36 | partly because at that point he had already taken | ||
| 182 | 10:39 | all of the courses in the catalog, but mainly because | ||
| 183 | 10:42 | he was so conspicuously wiser than any one of us. | ||
| 184 | 10:47 | To me, it was immensely reassuring that the presiding spirit | ||
| 185 | 10:51 | of this little Methodist college in upstate South Carolina | ||
| 186 | 10:55 | was a Holocaust survivor from Central Europe. | ||
| 187 | 10:59 | Wise he was, indeed, but he also had a wonderful sense of humor. | ||
| 188 | 11:03 | And once for an interdisciplinary class, | ||
| 189 | 11:06 | I was screening the opening segment of Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." | ||
| 190 | 11:10 | As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild goose chase | ||
| 191 | 11:14 | of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden, | ||
| 192 | 11:17 | only to find the specter of death waiting for him, | ||
| 193 | 11:20 | Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students. And | ||
| 194 | 11:24 | as death opened his cloak to embrace the knight | ||
| 195 | 11:28 | in a ghastly embrace, I heard Mr. Teszler's tremulous voice: | ||
| 196 | 11:32 | "Uh oh," he said, "This doesn't look so good." (Laughter) | ||
| 197 | 11:36 | But it was music that was his greatest passion, especially opera. | ||
| 198 | 11:43 | And on the first occasion that I visited his house, he gave me | ||
| 199 | 11:46 | honor of deciding what piece of music we would listen to. | ||
| 200 | 11:50 | And I delighted him by rejecting "Cavalleria Rusticana" | ||
| 201 | 11:54 | in favor of Bela Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle." | ||
| 202 | 11:57 | I love Bartok's music, as did Mr. Teszler, | ||
| 203 | 12:00 | and he had virtually every recording of Bartok's music ever issued. | ||
| 204 | 12:04 | And it was at his house that I heard for the first time | ||
| 205 | 12:06 | Bartok's Third Piano Concerto and learned from | ||
| 206 | 12:09 | Mr. Teszler that it had been composed in nearby Asheville, North Carolina | ||
| 207 | 12:14 | in the last year of the composer's life. | ||
| 208 | 12:16 | He was dying of leukemia and he knew it, | ||
| 209 | 12:19 | and he dedicated this concerto to his wife, | ||
| 210 | 12:22 | Dita, who was herself a concert pianist. | ||
| 211 | 12:25 | And into the slow, second movement, marked "adagio religioso," | ||
| 212 | 12:29 | he incorporated the sounds of birdsong that he heard | ||
| 213 | 12:33 | outside his window in what he knew would be his last spring; | ||
| 214 | 12:36 | he was imagining a future for her in which he would play no part. | ||
| 215 | 12:42 | And clearly this composition is his final statement to her -- | ||
| 216 | 12:48 | it was first performed after his death -- | ||
| 217 | 12:50 | and through her to the world. | ||
| 218 | 12:52 | And just as clearly, it is saying, "It's okay. It was all so beautiful. | ||
| 219 | 12:59 | Whenever you hear this, I will be there." | ||
| 220 | 13:03 | It was only after Mr. Teszler's death that I learned | ||
| 221 | 13:08 | that the marker on the grave of Bela Bartok in Hartsdale, New York | ||
| 222 | 13:12 | was paid for by Sandor Teszler. "Jó napot, Bela!" | ||
| 223 | 13:17 | Not long before Mr. Teszler’s own death at the age of 97, | ||
| 224 | 13:22 | he heard me hold forth on human iniquity. | ||
| 225 | 13:26 | I delivered a lecture in which I described history | ||
| 226 | 13:28 | as, on the whole, a tidal wave of human suffering and brutality, | ||
| 227 | 13:32 | and Mr. Teszler came up to me afterwards with gentle reproach and said, | ||
| 228 | 13:37 | "You know, Doctor, human beings are fundamentally good." | ||
| 229 | 13:43 | And I made a vow to myself, then and there, | ||
| 230 | 13:47 | that if this man who had such cause to think otherwise | ||
| 231 | 13:51 | had reached that conclusion, | ||
| 232 | 13:53 | I would not presume to differ until he released me from my vow. | ||
| 233 | 13:57 | And now he's dead, so I'm stuck with my vow. | ||
| 234 | 14:01 | "Jó napot, Sandor!" | ||
| 235 | 14:03 | I thought my skein of Hungarian mentors had come to an end, | ||
| 236 | 14:07 | but almost immediately I met Francis Robicsek, a Hungarian doctor -- | ||
| 237 | 14:14 | actually a heart surgeon in Charlotte, North Carolina, then in his late seventies -- | ||
| 238 | 14:18 | who had been a pioneer in open-heart surgery, | ||
| 239 | 14:20 | and, tinkering away in his garage behind his house, | ||
| 240 | 14:24 | had invented many of the devices that are standard parts of those procedures. | ||
| 241 | 14:29 | He's also a prodigious art collector, beginning as an intern in Budapest | ||
| 242 | 14:34 | by collecting 16th- and 17th-century Dutch art and Hungarian painting, | ||
| 243 | 14:38 | and when he came to this country moving on to Spanish colonial art, | ||
| 244 | 14:43 | Russian icons and finally Mayan ceramics. | ||
| 245 | 14:46 | He's the author of seven books, six of them on Mayan ceramics. | ||
| 246 | 14:49 | It was he who broke the Mayan codex, enabling scholars to relate | ||
| 247 | 14:53 | the pictographs on Mayan ceramics to the hieroglyphs of the Mayan script. | ||
| 248 | 14:57 | On the occasion of my first visit, we toured his house | ||
| 249 | 15:00 | and we saw hundreds of works of museum quality, | ||
| 250 | 15:03 | and then we paused in front of a closed door and Dr. Robicsek said, | ||
| 251 | 15:08 | with obvious pride, "Now for the piece De resistance." | ||
| 252 | 15:11 | And he opened the door and we walked into a | ||
| 253 | 15:14 | windowless 20-by-20-foot room with shelves from floor to ceiling, and | ||
| 254 | 15:20 | crammed on every shelf his collection of Mayan ceramics. | ||
| 255 | 15:22 | Now, I know absolutely nothing about Mayan ceramics, | ||
| 256 | 15:24 | but I wanted to be as ingratiating as possible so I said, | ||
| 257 | 15:27 | "But Dr. Robicsek, this is absolutely dazzling." | ||
| 258 | 15:31 | "Yes," he said. "That is what the Louvre said. | ||
| 259 | 15:34 | They would not leave me alone until I let them have a piece, | ||
| 260 | 15:38 | but it was not a good one." (Laughter) | ||
| 261 | 15:40 | Well, it occurred to me that I should invite Dr. Robicsek | ||
| 262 | 15:44 | to lecture at Wofford College on -- what else? | ||
| 263 | 15:47 | -- Leonardo da Vinci. And further, I should invite him to meet | ||
| 264 | 15:51 | my oldest trustee, who had majored in French history at Yale | ||
| 265 | 15:55 | some 70-odd years before and, at 89, still ruled the world's | ||
| 266 | 16:00 | largest privately owned textile empire with an iron hand. | ||
| 267 | 16:05 | His name is Roger Milliken. And Mr. Milliken agreed, | ||
| 268 | 16:09 | and Dr. Robicsek agreed. And Dr. Robicsek visited | ||
| 269 | 16:12 | and delivered the lecture and it was a dazzling success. | ||
| 270 | 16:15 | And afterwards we convened at the President's House with Dr. Robicsek | ||
| 271 | 16:19 | on one hand, Mr. Milliken on the other. | ||
| 272 | 16:20 | And it was only at that moment, as we were sitting down to dinner, | ||
| 273 | 16:24 | that I recognized the enormity of the risk I had created, | ||
| 274 | 16:27 | because to bring these two titans, these two masters of the universe | ||
| 275 | 16:30 | together -- it was like introducing Mothra to Godzilla over the skyline of Tokyo. | ||
| 276 | 16:35 | If they didn't like each other, we could all get trampled to death. | ||
| 277 | 16:38 | But they did, they did like each other. | ||
| 278 | 16:40 | They got along famously until the very end of the meal, | ||
| 279 | 16:43 | and then they got into a furious argument. | ||
| 280 | 16:45 | And what they were arguing about was this: | ||
| 281 | 16:47 | whether the second Harry Potter movie was as good as the first. (Laughter) | ||
| 282 | 16:52 | Mr. Milliken said it was not. Dr. Robicsek disagreed. | ||
| 283 | 16:57 | I was still trying to take in the notion that these titans, | ||
| 284 | 17:01 | these masters of the universe, in their spare time watch Harry Potter movies, | ||
| 285 | 17:05 | when Mr. Milliken thought he would win the argument by saying, | ||
| 286 | 17:08 | "You just think it's so good because you didn't read the book." | ||
| 287 | 17:11 | And Dr. Robicsek reeled back in his chair, but quickly gathered his wits, | ||
| 288 | 17:15 | leaned forward and said, "Well, that is true, but I'll bet you went | ||
| 289 | 17:18 | to the movie with a grandchild." "Well, yes, I did," conceded Mr. Milliken. | ||
| 290 | 17:23 | "Aha!" said Dr. Robicsek. "I went to the movie all by myself." (Laughter) (Applause) | ||
| 291 | 17:28 | And I realized, in this moment of revelation, | ||
| 292 | 17:33 | that what these two men were revealing was the secret | ||
| 293 | 17:37 | of their extraordinary success, each in his own right. | ||
| 294 | 17:40 | And it lay precisely in that insatiable curiosity, | ||
| 295 | 17:44 | that irrepressible desire to know, no matter what the subject, | ||
| 296 | 17:48 | no matter what the cost, | ||
| 297 | 17:50 | even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock | ||
| 298 | 17:53 | are willing to bet even money that the human race won't be around | ||
| 299 | 17:56 | to imagine anything in the year 2100, a scant 93 years from now. | ||
| 300 | 18:01 | "Live each day as if it is your last," said Mahatma Gandhi. | ||
| 301 | 18:05 | "Learn as if you'll live forever." | ||
| 302 | 18:07 | This is what I'm passionate about. It is precisely this. | ||
| 303 | 18:12 | It is this inextinguishable, undaunted appetite for learning and experience, | ||
| 304 | 18:21 | no matter how risible, no matter how esoteric, | ||
| 305 | 18:23 | no matter how seditious it might seem. | ||
| 306 | 18:26 | This defines the imagined futures of our fellow Hungarians -- | ||
| 307 | 18:32 | Robicsek, Teszler and Bartok -- as it does my own. | ||
| 308 | 18:37 | As it does, I suspect, that of everybody here. | ||
| 309 | 18:41 | To which I need only add, "Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves." | ||
| 310 | 18:47 | This is our task; we know it will be hard. | ||
| 311 | 18:52 | "Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves. Jó napot, pacák!" (Applause) |