Top 48 Varoufakis Quotes
#1. When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he famously replied that "it would be a very good idea.
Yanis Varoufakis
#2. In 1950 the European Union was officially born in the form of a German-dominated cartel of coal and steel, run of course by a cross-border French-dominated administration located in Brussels. Its name? The European Steel and Coal Community.
Yanis Varoufakis
#3. Berlin has traditionally backed a rules-based eurozone in which every member state is responsible for its own finances, including bank bailouts, with political union limited to a fiscal overlord's possessing veto power over national budgets that violate the rules.
Yanis Varoufakis
#4. Simple logic dictates that if you cannot even conceive the possibility of leaving a negotiation, then it is preferable never to enter one.
Yanis Varoufakis
#5. For some reason, lots of terrible things start here and then spread. The Cold War was one. It didn't start in Berlin - it started in Athens in December 1944; the contagion in the eurozone started here in 2010. We are perfectly capable as Europeans of messing things up unnecessarily.
Yanis Varoufakis
#6. How can a radical scepticism about the state be squared with a religious dedication to the notion that market outcomes are, by definition, optimal?
Yanis Varoufakis
#8. Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.
Yanis Varoufakis
#9. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the U.S. military's might, three printing firms, and hundreds of trucks.
Yanis Varoufakis
#10. General Motors is alive and kicking today, it is because in 2009 President Obama's administration wrote off 90 percent of its debt.
Yanis Varoufakis
#11. Even though I resigned as Papandreou's adviser early in 2006 and turned into his government's staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism.
Yanis Varoufakis
#12. At a time of recession, when there is a mounting glut of labour and uninvested savings, a reduction in wages and interest rates does not help. In fact, it deepens the recession.
Yanis Varoufakis
#13. My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.
Yanis Varoufakis
#14. I was told once by a leftwing scholar that as a Marxist, you have to do two things: always be optimistic and always have a view about everything. That advice still sounds good to me.
Yanis Varoufakis
#15. All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution).
Yanis Varoufakis
#16. They are unanimous in their hate for me; and I welcome their hatred. (quoting FDR announcing the Second New Deal, 1936)
Yanis Varoufakis
#17. Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value.
Yanis Varoufakis
#19. The many refugees are not a Greek or German problem. They are a European problem. We should therefore develop a common strategy. That's why I am launching a cross-border movement for more democracy.
Yanis Varoufakis
#20. Nothing is more boring than talking to people who share my opinion anyway.
Yanis Varoufakis
#21. If the British think they can simply detach from the continent and sail towards the USA or China, then they are mistaken.
Yanis Varoufakis
#22. Corporatists like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet were bent on constructing the Brussels-based bureaucracy as a democracy-free zone.
Yanis Varoufakis
#23. My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair.
Yanis Varoufakis
#24. Anyone who toys with the idea of cutting off bits of the eurozone hoping the rest will survive is playing with fire.
Yanis Varoufakis
#25. I plan to concentrate on helping set up a Pan-European political movement, inspired by the Athens Spring, that will work toward Europe's democratization.
Yanis Varoufakis
#26. Once their gaze turned back toward Europe, the puzzle dissolved: West Germany was the obvious equivalent and, indeed, a splendid candidate for the role of the global plan's European shock-absorbing pillar - certainly not Britain.
Yanis Varoufakis
#27. If the 'Athens Spring' - when the Greek people courageously rejected the catastrophic austerity conditions of the previous bailouts - has one lesson to teach, it is that Greece will recover only when the European Union makes the transition from 'We the states' to 'We the European people.'
Yanis Varoufakis
#28. Count Coudenhove-Kalergi put it succinctly in one of his speeches when he declared his ambition that Europe "supersedes democracy" and that democracy be replaced by a "social aristocracy of the spirit."52
Yanis Varoufakis
#29. Alas, this was an open invitation to print one's own money! No wonder Warren Buffet took one look at the fabled CDOs and described
Yanis Varoufakis
#30. But unlike Nevada, Ireland had to fend for itself when it came to propping up its banks and paying its unemployment benefits. Lacking a printing press, it had to go cap in hand to the money markets to borrow huge quantities of money that, in Nevada's case, had been paid for at the federal level.
Yanis Varoufakis
#31. Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone.
Yanis Varoufakis
#33. By year's end, on 31 December, the New York stock exchange has lost more than 31 per cent of its total value since 1 January 2008.
Yanis Varoufakis
#34. In other words, the uninsured private bankers had to be bailed out illegally and utterly unethically. But the taxpayers who were forced to carry that can should not even be given better terms for repaying the odious, private debt they were forced to acquire in order to bail the bankers out.
Yanis Varoufakis
#35. I will not contest my parliamentary seat in a sad election that will not produce a Parliament capable of endorsing a realistic reform agenda for Greece.
Yanis Varoufakis
#36. Every sensible banker understands that Greece should not have received any more money: a bankrupt state that can never be expected to repay loans is not a good debtor.
Yanis Varoufakis
#37. The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency.
Yanis Varoufakis
#38. It is the mark of ancient societies that contemporary tribulations reinvent old fears.
Yanis Varoufakis
#39. Greece was merely the laboratory where these failed policies were being tested and developed before their implementation everywhere across Europe.
Yanis Varoufakis
#40. Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players.
Yanis Varoufakis
#41. Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced.
Yanis Varoufakis
#42. I don't believe a Brexit will hurt the City of London as one of the largest financial centers in the world.
Yanis Varoufakis
#43. This book originally aimed at pressing a useful metaphor into the service of elucidating a troubled world; a world
Yanis Varoufakis
#44. Years of crisis have culminated in a Europe that has lost legitimacy with its own citizens and credibility with the rest of the world.
Yanis Varoufakis
#45. Germany is Europe's heart. But bitterness is widespread. Currently the Germans hate the Greeks and the Greeks hate the Germans. The demonization of the country has to stop if we want a strong Europe. So I am setting a positive example.
Yanis Varoufakis
#47. The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge.
Yanis Varoufakis
#48. We will compromise and compromise and compromise but we will never be compromised.
Yanis Varoufakis
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