Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. quotes from The Brutalist (2024)

Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.

When dogs get sick, they often bite the hand of those who fed them, until someone mercifully puts them down.

Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.

This is why I never do business with Italians. The spics of Europe.

Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.

What have you done to yourself? It's a shame seeing how your people treat themselves. If you resent your persecution, why then do you make of yourself such an easy target? If you act as a loafer living off handouts, a societal leech, how can you rightfully expect a different result?

László Tóth

Nothing is of its own explanation. Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction? There was a war on. And yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived. They remain there still in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed. But my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube's shoreline.

Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.

What a poetic reply.