"To be a Hungarian is a collective neurosis,’ said Arthur Koestler, one of Hungary’s most distinguished émigrés.  Indeed, Hungarians, like no other national group, have somehow managed to combine pessimism and gallows humor with stoicism and survival strategies.  They can be called a nation of compulsive over achievers, infected with paranoia-tinged patriotism.  Burdened by a long record of glorious defeats in war – by the Turks, Tatars and Hapsburgs – and the failure of two major uprisings – in 1848, against the Habsburgs, and in 1956, against the Russians – Hungarians, like jilted lovers, tend to alternate easily between impulsive over-confidence and bleak fatalism and are always anxious to escape prosaic reality in search of their largely non-existent heroic past."
~Vitali Vitaliev,Borders Up!, 2002