Best 21 quotes of Yanis Varoufakis on MyQuotes

Yanis Varoufakis

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    Anyone who toys with the idea of cutting off bits of the eurozone hoping the rest will survive is playing with fire.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    European Union partners never said European Union partners're going to renege on any promises, European Union partners said that European Union partners promises concern a four-year parliamentary term, european Union partners will be spaced out in an optimal way, in a way that is in tune with our bargaining stance in Europe and also with the fiscal position of the Greek state.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    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.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    Fences and borders are a sign of weakness.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    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.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no indsturial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    I don't believe a Brexit will hurt the City of London as one of the largest financial centers in the world.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    If the British think they can simply detach from the continent and sail towards the USA or China, then they are mistaken.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    I'm the finance minister of a bankrupt country!

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    Nothing is more boring than talking to people who share my opinion anyway.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    The economic crisis has weakened the EU for years.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    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.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    After hovering in the ethereal world of mathematics and geometry, economics was forced to crash-land and take its place in the real world of political debate. Do economists wish to pursue the Good Society in the spirit of the social contract tradition which started some time in ancient Greece, reasserted itself in Europe with J.-J.Rousseau and found its apotheosis in John Rawls? Or do they wish for a social contract which effectively rules the State out as anything other than a provider of order and security—a tradition which began with Thomas Hobbes and culminated in Robert Nozick’s theory? Or, indeed can economists think of something in between? Thus economics is back into the mire courtesy of Arrow’s third theorem, which dispels any hopes of a Rational Society springing from some form of advanced utility maximisation. Economics can no longer escape the political, philosophical debates which resonate across the humanities—from literature to sociology and from politics to moral philosophy. This is a good thing. At last, economics can become interesting again after a century of continuous pedantry.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    Fellow economists get very cross with me when I tell them that we face a choice: we can keep pretending we are scientists, like astrologists do, or admit that we are more like philosophers, who will never know the meaning of life for sure, no matter how wisely and rationally they argue. But were we to confess that we are at best worldly philosophers, it is unlikely we would continue to be so handsomely rewarded by the ruling class of a market society whose legitimacy we provide by pretending to be scientists.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    Greece's bailout, then Ireland's, then Portgual's, then Spain's were primarily rescue packages for French and German banks.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    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.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    In the meantime, it is useful to end this chapter by pondering a paradox. On the one hand, as already noted, economics is replete with eulogies to freedom (particularly of the market). However, on the other hand, the type of freedom that economics textbooks talk about is compatible with the science fiction image of rows and rows of persons attached to a pleasure machine which bombards them with utility (or, to be more respectful to ordinal utility, which keeps them at the very top of their preferences ordering). Less apocalyptically, it is consistent with a society in which individuals’ ideals have been reduced to purchasing commodities in gigantic shopping complexes guided totally by cravings manufactured in elaborate marketing clinics. Perhaps the most helpful conclusion to draw from all this is that the economic textbook’s model of rational choice is the culmination of the logic unleashed on the world by the emergence and domination of market societies (see Chapter 1 again). One question is worth keeping in mind when immersed in that logic: is a happy slave (a slave of feudal masters or, today, of the advertisers) capable of being free (whatever that person’s utility level)? So, if freedom is more than just desire-fulfilment what does it mean to be free? No one has the definitive answer but here is a suggestion: individual freedom may be the capacity to act freely, not only in order to satisfy the preferences that are there already (the utility machine can do this admirably), but in order to create new and better preferences—in order to improve one’s self. We can do this only if we care about more than the indulgence of our current desires.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    The ancient Greek word for money, for currency, is 'nomisma.' It comes from the verb 'to imagine.'" "So money has value to the extent that we imagine that it has value, according to the ancient Greeks. They knew that more than 2,000 years ago, and we kind of forget that simple, important notion at times.

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    The notion that elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy, indeed any policy, is a gift to [founder and leader of Singapore] Lee Kuan Yew supporters or indeed the Chinese communist party, who also believe this to be true. There is of course a long tradition of doubting the efficacy of the democratic process. But I would like to think that his tradition has been expelled long ago from the heart of Europe. It now seems that the euro crisis has brought it back. I urge you all to band together in a collective bid to resist it. Democracy is not a luxury to be afforded to the creditors and denied to the debtors. Indeed, it is the lack of democratic process in the heart of our monetary union that is perpetuating the euro crisis. Then again, I might be wrong. Colleagues, if you think that I am wrong, if you agree with Wolfgang, then I invite you to say so explicitly by proposing that elections should be suspended in countries like Greece until the country's programme is completed. What is the point of spending money on elections and asking our people to get all fired up to elect governments that will have no capacity to change anything?

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    Yanis Varoufakis

    ... toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult.