Yanis Varoufakis Best Quotes

#1. Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#2. How can a radical scepticism about the state be squared with a religious dedication to the notion that market outcomes are, by definition, optimal? - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#3. 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. - Author: 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#5. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#6. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#7. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#8. We will compromise and compromise and compromise but we will never be compromised. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#9. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#10. We Greeks are the blacks of Europe. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#11. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#12. Years of crisis have culminated in a Europe that has lost legitimacy with its own citizens and credibility with the rest of the world. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#13. This book originally aimed at pressing a useful metaphor into the service of elucidating a troubled world; a world - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#14. I don't believe a Brexit will hurt the City of London as one of the largest financial centers in the world. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#15. Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#16. The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#17. Greece was merely the laboratory where these failed policies were being tested and developed before their implementation everywhere across Europe. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#18. It is the mark of ancient societies that contemporary tribulations reinvent old fears. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#19. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#20. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#21. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#22. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#23. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#24. The economic crisis has weakened the EU for years. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#25. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#26. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#27. 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 - Author: 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 - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#29. 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.' - Author: Yanis Varoufakis

#30. 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. - Author: Yanis Varoufakis