75 quotes found
"A party should be founded not merely on numbers, but on moral principles, without which it can neither accomplish useful work nor inspire confidence."
"Neutrality is not politics."
"Greece expects you not merely to die for her, for that is little, indeed; she expects you to conquer. That is why each one of you, even in dying, should be possessed by one thought alone – how to conserve your strength to the last so that those who survive may conquer. And you will conquer, I am more than sure of this."
"Salonique à tout prix!"
"I had to decide [he said later] whether I would be a lawyer by profession and a revolutionary at intervals, or a revolutionary by profession and a lawyer at intervals."
"The European policy is invariably the maintenance of the status quo, and you will do nothing for the subject races unless we, by taking initiative, make you realize that helping us against the Turks is the lesser of the evils."
"England in all her wars has always gained one battle - the last!"
"All my life with all my heart I wanted the union of Crete and Greece. I wanted it to be sustained by profound mutual affection. I swear that was my only desire...Greece will never see me again."
"Recognizing the need for the [political] education of the Greek People and its emancipation from personal parties, I shall work ... for the organization of a political association with branches throughout the country, which is going to become the organization of the new political party of regeneration that the people urgently expect."
"One cannot kick against geography!"
"Of course the King is mistaken. But is natural that he should be frighten of taking the plunge. We have lost a great opportunity by not intervening at once. But later the King may change his mind, and it may be not too late."
"I shall fight them!"
"I do not wish to depreciate his great gifts and attainments in a country which unfortunately, if I may say so without offense, is suffering from a temporary lack of leading men.""
"I am not going to talk of the grandeur of the Acropolis, nor do I intend to torment you with a lecture on archaeology. I have been to see strange and picturesque lands, among them Crete. You will never guess, though, my most interesting discovery in the island, one more interesting by far than the splendours of the excavations. I will tell you. A young advocate, a M. Venezuelos . . . Venizelos? Frankly, I cannot quite recall his name, but the whole of Europe will be speaking of him in a few years."
"When he is with me, I confess that his arguments are so convincing that I quickly begin to imagine that they are my own."
"It was in fact more plausible for the Turks to portray the Greeks as a fifth column, since the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos strongly favoured Greek intervention on the side of the Entente powers and, although King Constantine resisted until finally driven to abdicate in June 1917, the presence of an Anglo-French force at Salonika from October 1915 cast doubt on the credibility of Greek neutrality. Viewed from Salonika, the First World War was the Third Balkan War, with Bulgaria joining Germany and Austria in the rout of Serbia; indeed, it was to shore up the disintegrating Serbian position that the Entente powers had sent their troops to Salonika. It was too late. The Anglo-French force remained penned in, unable, despite Greece's belated entry into the war, to prevent the German-Bulgarian defeat of Romania in 1917. Yet the final phase of the war saw a collapse as complete as that suffered by the Germans on the Western Front. An offensive on the Salonika Front forced Bulgaria to sue for peace on September 25,1918; six days later the British marched into Damascus, having defeated the Turkish army in Syria."
"On October 30 the Turks surrendered. For Venizelos it was a moment of intoxicating triumph. He had begun his political career by leading the revolt that had driven the Turks out of Crete; he had led Greece to victory in the First and Second Balkan Wars; he had finally got his way over the Third, and won that too. Now he saw an opportunity to extend Greek power further, from the Péloponnèse across the Aegean to Anatolia itself. It was in fact the British government that initially encouraged Greek forces to occupy Smyrna. Lloyd George's motive was to forestall Italian moves to annex the city; mutinous Italian troops, led by the flamboyant poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, had already acted unilaterally by occupying Fiume on the Adriatic in defiance of the other members of the Big Four. At first the campaign went the Greeks' way. They advanced deep into Anatolia. In the best traditions of classical Greek drama, however, hubris was soon followed by nemesis. The crisis of defeat had led to revolution in Turkey. In April 1920 a Grand National Assembly was established in Ankara, which repudiated the Treaty of Sèvres and offered the post of President to the fair-haired, blue-eyed, hard-drinking General Mustafa Kemal. Almost simultaneously, Venizelos fell from power in Athens and the British, French and Italians withdrew their support for the Greek expedition."
"When the two of us are alone and we disagree, Venizelos never convinces me! If we are three of us, I begin to waver. The moment he address several people, at cabinet meeting for instance, it often happens that I am carried away too, along with the others!"
"More dangerously, the past held the promise of a reborn Greek empire. Eleutherios Venizelos, the leading Greek statesman at the time of World War I, once gathered his friends around a map and drew the outlines of the ancient Greece, at the height of its influence, across the modern borders. His outline included most of modern Turkey, a good part of Albania, and most of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. (He could have but did not also include parts of Italy.) Under the influence of that great (megali) idea, he sent Greek soldiers to Asia Minor in 1919 to stake out Greece’s claims. The result was a catastrophe for the Greek armies and for all those innocent Greeks who had lived for generations in what became modern Turkey. As the resurgent Turkish armies under Kemal Atatürk pressed the Greek forces back, hundreds of thousands of bewildered refugees, many ofwhom barely knew Greek, followed them. In turn, huge numbers of Turks, many distinguished from their Greek neighbours only by their religion, abandoned their homes and villages for Turkey. The events of those years have in turn become part of history and have poisoned relations between Greece and Turkey up to the present."
"Venizelos and Lenin are the only two really great men in Europe."
"Merely the fact that his name has been so dominant among all citizens of this country - with his supporters known as Venizelists and his opponents as anti-Venizelists - testifies to the significance of the deceased and the role he played."
"Venizelos! Venizelos! Make our country great again! Thou, our second Pericles."
"Καλοδεχούμενος όταν έρθει αρκεί να με βρει όρθιο και δυνατό"
"Γιατί να το κρύψωμεν άλλωστε;"
"Yes, it was unfair (Directly quoted in Greek as "Ανφέρ")"
"He was glorified while in hiding, but vanished when he appearing."
"Think, Andreas, if you die in America, how many people will come to your funeral? Then think how many will follow your casket in Athens if you stay."
"The Paraskevopoulos government was our last chance for avoiding a military take-over. With your [Andreas'] militant stand against it, with your strong statements against the King, with your distrust you instilled in the American contingent here, this became inevitable."
"National Independence, Popular Sovereignty, Social Liberation, Democratic Process."
"Time for "Change" has come."
"There are no institutions – only the people rule this country."
"Greece belongs to the Greeks.("Η Ελλάδα ανήκει στους 'Ελληνες.")"
"We consume more than we produce."
"Greece is rich but the Greeks are poor."
"I accuse my accusers."
"The Greeks have betrayed me."
"Tsovola give it [to them] all. (Τσοβόλα δώσ'τα όλα.)"
"Power to the people."
"I'm grateful to no one about anything."
"I no longer trust anyone, not even myself."
"Don't worry, I’ll stop the audit. As long as I'm prime minister, nothing's going to happen."
"It might be expected that an official would offer himself a present, but not one as big as 500 million drachmas."
"Simitis is good, but he is not PASOK."
"I may not believe in a Turkish threat, you may not believe in a Turkish threat, but the Greek public believes in it, and that makes it Greek reality and you have to deal with it in those terms."
"Greece's only successful fascist regime probably was Andreas Papandreou's [...] Both the military regime of John Metaxas, from 1936 to 1941, and the junta from 1967 to 1974, never achieved a broad level of popular response to their message, which was seen as artificial, even ridiculous. By contrast, Papandreou's posturings and habits reassured a people who harbored a mistrust and envy of the West that their way of life was legitimate. Much like Mussolini, Papandreou succeeded as the embodiment of a nationalist-populist resentment. He was the ideal Greek every-man. He threatened America and backed up these threats by embracing America's enemies—Qaddafi and the terrorists. Papandreou danced the traditional Greek dances in public. He distributed the wealth to his partisans as a reward for their loyalty. Even with the Liani affair, in a male-oriented society like Greece's there was a certain resonance. Papandreou projected the Mussoliniesque image of the nation's first lover. His divorce and humiliation of Margaret Chant not only reinforced his (and Greece's) break with America, but also with another threatening demon of the Greek male, feminism."
"He [Andreas Papandreou] wanted to build a state with better salaries and services. But in the end, the money just went into the bureaucracy and not to the people. In fact, we built up such a large state that we had to keep borrowing just to pay its expenses. This was a terrible mistake."
"Andreas Papandreou corrupted the Greek psyche and gave to Greeks an entitlement culture based on their existence and not on their ability to work and take risks."
"One of the most courageous and committed politicians I have ever met."
"Andreas is an actor who does not believe in anything. He loves himself, power and women, and that's all."
"He's an unpredictable, very irresponsible man, ruthlessly ambitious, Andreas has to be Prime Minister of the world to be happy. But he has always had very generous feelings toward the Greek people."
"Andreas was not a philanderer. He was a serial monogamist."
"There are many scandals in Greece [...] The only difference in my case is that here someone is saying, himself, what he did with Papandreou."
"He's one of the most fascinating characters [modern] Greek history has produced, but after all the sound and fury, he signifies nothing."
"Each leader has the privilege of choosing the way he will leave [the political scene], [...] Andreas Papandreou chose to deny reality."
"Δεν υπάρχει τέλος της ιστορίας. Το σήμερα έχει συνέχεια το αύριο. Από εμάς τους ίδιους εξαρτάται η συνέχεια αυτή."
"Our political practice followed the same track as that of the right-wing governments; many times we implemented ad hoc policies; we maintained clientelistic relations between government and voters; we made selective allocations of funds and we introduced measures benefiting specific groups. The principle governing our political practice was that the party and the government were always right and that their actions had to be justified;... we do not need attractive slogans that create rising expectations but systematic programming and well-planned action."
"Populism transfers the social problem from the plain of ideology to a level that does not disturb the status quo of social relations. The assistance of the state and the benefits derived from it is the sole objective of political struggles in Greece."
"State authority cannot, and must not, dominate economic and social activity."
"When I took over as Prime Minister, I had already known Andreas for more than thirty years. There were very few PASOK cadres who had been with him for such a long time. Political commentators highlighted our conflicts, the distance that separated us in life and politics, our different behaviors. However, they overlooked our many commonalities: our resistance to the junta, our struggles for the establishment and development of PASOK, our confrontation with the Right, our cooperation for an effective government. We maintained a stable relationship between us, despite any friction."
"Greece belongs to the West."
"Who governs this country?"
"Hellas has been transformed to an endless bedlam."
"In democracies, prime ministers do not go to prison. They return home."
"In the history of all nations, there are instances in which the crisis of institutions and morals becomes so deep that, in order to save democracy, one should remake it."
"You made me come back on 24 July in order to save the country that was in danger. But if you do not mean to give me the ample majority I need to carry out my mission, then what is the point of having me back?"
"Greece is plagued by just one single problem: its politics. The misfortune of our people is caused by the unhealthy nature of the political environment and the defective organization of public life."
"It is our opinion that the misfortunes of our people are mainly due to the imperfect organization and shortcomings of public life [...] The problem is of a political nature [... and it can only be solved with the creation of] a new political force that will become the point of convergence of all progressive and healthy elements of our times [...] a force that will generate a new political and moral ethos."
"As you know, the functioning of democracy and especially of parliamentary democracy presupposes the existence of parties with [long] traditions, steadfast principles, a program, as well as a leadership inspired by a sense of responsibility. Because political parties [...] have the most decisive role in democracies. In point of fact, one can claim that it is political parties rather than governments that peoples attach to; and that a regimes fortune is more affected by the number and behavior of [its] political parties than by its formal institutional framework."
"What Right are you talking about? Am I the Right-winger? And who are the Leftists? Wasn’t it I who, as soon as I took over after the Civil War, stopped the executions and opened the prisons and exile camps? Wasn’t it the centrists who made Law 509, all the anti-communist legislation, the political loyalty declarations, the prisons, the exiles, and the executions? I took office just six years after the Civil War ended. And immediately, I found myself in the middle. On one side were my own people, the right-wingers, who wanted us to crush the communists, and on the other side were the communists, who refused to accept their defeat. So, gradually, I released them from prison; I didn’t carry out any executions, and I safeguarded the democracy of that time. So, I am the right-winger, and they are the democrats, who did all these things, which I found ready-made? And didn’t I also legalize the Communist Party after the dictatorship? Didn’t I withdraw from NATO when it was necessary? Didn’t I nationalize the companies of Andreadis, Onassis, and Niarchos? Didn’t I achieve the smooth and bloodless transition from dictatorship to democracy? Didn’t I contribute decisively to the abolition of the monarchy? Didn’t I guarantee the alternation of parties in power? Didn’t I draft the best Constitution Greece ever had? So what are you telling me now about being the leader of the Right? You all need to understand that the time has come to move away from slogans and labels, and for the parties to stop trapping people in rhetoric, in which they then become entangled themselves."
"I had often thought of the emotion I should feel when I set foot again on the soil of my country. And I may tell you that the thought brought tears to my eyes in anticipation. And yet never was I calmer, never did I have myself more completely under control, than the moment when I arrived at the airport. And the reason was that my sense of the responsibilities which I was about to undertake was so intense as to stifle, to banish every other thought."
"If a politician is capable and an honest servant, then it is you who need him and not the opposite. There is therefore no need for him to flatter you so that you vote for him. This is how I understand my relationship with the people."
"My loneliness, which is, as you know, inherent in my character, became almost absolute in politics. In politics it may have proved to be useful, since it freed me from weakness; however, it made my life depressing, because apart from anything else, it deprived me of the opportunity to have friends. Now that I need them it is too late to change, both because of ingrained habit and age."
"[He is] a special phenomenon: a man of humble origins, unremarkable intellectual endowment, infuriating obstinacy, but with an impeccable honesty, a statesmanlike flair in big issues and an accurate assessment of the needs and the motivations of his fellow countrymen which few politicians in our age have equalled. In the Greek context he was a Churchill."
"Karamanlis or the tanks"