74 Quotes by Yanis Varoufakis

Upton Sinclair once said, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Nothing prepares a people for authoritarianism better than defeat, followed closely by national humiliation and an economic implosion.

Bullies blame their victims. Clever bullies make their victims’ culpability seem self-evident.

My reason for writing it was the conviction that the economy is too important to leave to the economists.

And so it turns out that all talk of gradual moves toward a political union and toward “more Europe” are not first steps toward a European democratic federation but, rather, and ominously, a leap into an iron cage that prolongs the crisis and wrecks any prospect of a genuine federal European democracy in the future.

It is at this point in the book that the author famously laments that despite our ability to bring food from the earth, we are incapable of creating a system in which the hungry can be fed.

When economists insist that they too are scientists because they use mathematics, they are no different from astrologists protesting that they are just as scientific as astronomers because they also use computers and complicated charts.

Corporatists like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet were bent on constructing the Brussels-based bureaucracy as a democracy-free zone.

Most politicians cannot be theorists. First, because they are rarely thinkers; second, because the frenetic lifestyle they impose on themselves leaves no time for big ideas. But most of all because to be a theorist you have to admit the possibility of being wrong – the provisionality of knowledge – and you know you cannot spin your way out of a theoretical problem.