Ivan Lamper

"Personal humiliation is a thing which is hard to get rid of. That's why communism is so problematic and why we still debate on how to describe the times of normalization - because it had no victims; these were not the 1950s. From a normal standpoint, victims were those who went against the regime. To that, I can easily reply: 'Excuse me, I am no victim but a lucky person who managed to live a great life.' For me, victims are the humiliated people. But those would object: 'Humiliated - and by what?' The problem is that they feel the need to assure themselves that they hadn't been humiliated. But how do the signatories of the anti-Charter or those who ratted to the secret police manage that? Unless one is able to come to terms with it, they need to adapt,, modify their understanding of the world."

"From the perspective of a seventeen-year-old today, it is of course rubbish to try and publish samizdat. But back then, these were times when just transcribing a text such as a book, in ten copies - which today seems a laughable number - made sense, as long as such texts were officially unavailable."

"The samizdat magazine Sport was an attempt at normal journalism. We wanted to step over the framework of the already very successful cultural-social magazine Revolver Revue which was published once every three months and which was more about cultural topics than topical issues. Therefore, Sport strived to capture and cover events which had by the late 1980s finally begun taking place, in the frequency of one month."