Words matter. These are the best George Papandreou Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.
As long as I feel I am doing what I think is right and just for my country, for the Greek people, that is enough for me. Saving Greece from this crisis was the first thing on the agenda. We are now on a much more normalised road.
Every leader wants to put his or her imprint on the work that they do, and grow up in specific eras.
I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn’t have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.
My hope is that we will turn Greece into maybe the most transparent country in the world with everything on the web.
The real problem in Greece is not cutting taxes, it’s making sure that we don’t have tax evasion.
I would like to see Greece as a case study, an opportunity for Europe to strengthen its coordination of fiscal policy.
Today I want to send a message of optismism to all Greeks. Our road, our path, will be more stabilised. Our country will be in a better situation. We will be stronger.
Very often, people will come out and say, ‘Greeks aren’t doing things, Greeks aren’t making changes, there’s no reform,’ That is hogwash. We have made a huge effort. The Greek people have made a huge effort.
We had about 60 regions in Greece and now there are only 13. It’d be like cutting down 50 states to 13 and making it more efficient.
How can a parliamentarian or a leader in a country say, on the one hand, that we’re going to support Greece but at the same time say that Greeks are lazy?
We are a country with great potential. We have the political will to make deep changes in a just and equitable way, to put our country back on a development path, to meet the challenges of a new world.
We Greeks want change. We know there are problems in our system. We have great potential but we need to manage our country well. Now that hasn’t been done over the last decades. And that is, of course, what we are paying for.
Previous governments, particularly the one before I took over, mismanaged the economy quite badly.
There is this concept of politics as a dirty game. It’s a difficult game, but it doesn’t have to be dirty. I think this is what we need to bring to politics. I think politics around the world has very often been captured by big interests – ‘lobbies’ they call them in the States.
The Greek people do not want to exit the euro. And I believe the Greek people already have shown that they have made major sacrifices to stay in the euro zone.
If you put all the European countries together, we are the biggest economy in the world.
I have been supporting the European Union, but we are still a work in progress. We have to become more of a United States of Europe. We should talk about electing a president of the E.U., rather than having one selected from the heads of government.
We have made major reforms in Greece. When I took over after a landslide victory we had a mandate for change and I knew my major focus would be re-organizing the state.
We stand united, facing the big responsibility to change our country into a nation of justice, solidarity, humanity and green development.
Europe is a strong market for the U.S. If it has problems, if there’s a lack of consumer confidence, if there’s a deeper recession, this will deeply affect jobs in the U.S.
The unemployed in Greece can get a voucher and choose a training program somewhere in Europe to be retrained during this crisis and when this crisis is over, we make sure that that person hasn’t fallen off the cliff and can come back into the labor market with new skills to find a job.
I have a deep sense of responsibility to my country and Greek people.
Markets themselves are looking for stability, and I think we have underestimated the capacity of Europe… to actually create a more stable framework for the whole issue of debt management, bonds, and so on.
If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships – that made me feel that we had to change this country.
I never thought of politics as a profession.
I will always be upfront with the Greek people, so we can solve the country’s problems together.
Europe has a lot of strength. We need to pool that strength, and I am very much in favour of that – more of a deeper political union.
We have a rise of extremism because we need to give a sense that we are targeting some of the deeper problems in Greece, the injustices.
Politics also means educating people. It’s important to speak openly with our fellow Greeks, to tell them what our problems are and that we have to change something.
