Ioannis Georgiou “Yanis” Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016.
Yanis Varoufakis Quotes
1. “All babies are born naked, but soon after some are dressed in expensive clothes bought at the best boutiques, while the majority wear rags.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
2. “Upton Sinclair once said, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
3. “When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he famously replied that “it would be a very good idea.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
4. “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
5. “As Tony Benn, the British Labour politician, once suggested, we should constantly ask those who govern us five questions: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”
— Yanis Varoufakis
6. “If you cannot imagine walking out of a negotiation, you should never enter it. If you cannot fathom the idea of an impasse you might as well confine yourself to the role of a supplicant who implores the despot to grant him several privileges.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
7. “Bullies blame their victims. Clever bullies make their victims’ culpability seem self-evident.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
8. “The Matrix is a reflection of our times, or at least our anxieties. It reveals our fear of a mechanization so complete, of a commodification of our bodies and enslavement of our minds so successful, that we are no longer even aware of it, having been made oblivious to our reality by the very technologies that rule us.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
9. “Could the Crash of 2008, then, be nothing more than our periodic chance to realize how far we have allowed our will to be subjugated to capital? Was it a jolt that ought to awaken us to the reality that capital has become a ‘force we must submit to’, a power that developed ‘a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond’?”
— Yanis Varoufakis
10. “The worst slavery is that of heavily indoctrinated happy morons who adore their chains and cannot wait to thank their masters for the joy of their subservience.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
11. “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
12. “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.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
13. “All systems of domination work by enveloping us in their narrative and superstitions in such a way that we cannot see beyond them. Taking a step or two back, finding a way to inspect them from the outside, allows us a glimpse of how imperfect, how ludicrous, they are. Securing this glimpse keeps you in touch with reality.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
14. “It may seem paradoxical to you that preventing the destruction of the environment by market society’s preference for exchange value over experiential value should require us to convert every last remaining experiential value into exchange value, but this type of thinking and proposal is currently all the rage.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
15. “Nothing prepares a people for authoritarianism better than defeat, followed closely by national humiliation and an economic implosion.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
16. “Leonard Schapiro, writing on Stalinism, warned us that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
17. “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.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
18. “My reason for writing it was the conviction that the economy is too important to leave to the economists.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
19. “Corporatists like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet were bent on constructing the Brussels-based bureaucracy as a democracy-free zone.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
20. “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.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
21. “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.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
22. “And here lies a delicious paradox: consent grew more powerful the more economic life was financialized. And as finance grew in importance, the more prone our societies became to economic crises. Hence the interesting observation that modern societies tend to produce both more consent and more violent crises.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
23. “Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
24. “In a move that will remain in Irish annals as a stigma comparable to the potato famine, the Dublin government succumbed to ECB blackmail: make the German creditors of Ireland’s commercial banks whole, even a bank that was closed down and thus no longer systemically important for Ireland’s financial sector, or else.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
25. “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
26. “ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE once wrote that those who praise freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
27. “It is the mark of ancient societies that contemporary tribulations reinvent old fears.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
28. “As I have frequently observed, there is a widespread belief in Europe’s north that the continent is populated by hard-working law-abiding ants on the one hand and lazy tax-avoiding grasshoppers on the other, and that all the ants live in the north while mysteriously the grasshoppers congregate in the south.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
29. “Without profit, they would have become slaves to their creditors.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
30. “We were divided and ultimately we were ruled.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
31. “Few progressive Europeans would argue against a democratic United States of Europe, with a proper government elected on a pan-European ticket and answerable to a proper parliament vested with complete sovereignty over all decisions and matters. But this is pure wishful thinking. The sobering reality is that it is not in the European Union’s DNA naturally to evolve into a federation.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
32. “In important ways, we resemble hamsters on their spinning wheels: no matter how fast we run, we are not really going anywhere. We might well conclude that the machines aren’t slaving away for our benefit; at times it even seems like we’re working furiously to maintain them.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
33. “Hindsight blurs history and tortures the mind with sterile hypotheticals.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
34. “When our eyes fall on those who lack the bare necessities, we immediately sympathize and express outrage that they do not have enough, but we do not for a moment allow ourselves to think that their deprivation may be the product of the same process that led to our affluence.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
35. “My dear Eva,’ Iris replied, ‘universities are not about imparting skills. They are about producing flexible minions dying to do as they are told. You are there to manufacture young people willing – desperate – to be moulded to their future bosses’ priorities. And the first step is to get them to swallow without question your faith that markets are as natural as gravity and profit the only worthy aspiration.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
36. “The black magic of banking destabilizes market societies. It massively amplifies wealth creation during the good times and wealth destruction during the bad times, constantly skewing the distribution of power and money. But to be fair, bankers are just that: massive amplifiers. The root causes of market society’s fundamental instability lie elsewhere, buried deeply in the weird nature of two peculiar commodities: human labour and money.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
