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Eleftherios Venizelos

Greek politician, former Prime Minister of Greece; (1864-1936)

Elefthérios Kyriákou Venizélos (23 August 1864 – 18 March 1936) was a Greek politician. He was Prime Minister of Greece during 1910-15, 1917-20 and 1928-32.

I had to decide whether I would be a lawyer by profession and a revolutionary at intervals, or a revolutionary by profession and a lawyer at intervals.

Quotes

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A party should be founded not merely on numbers, but on moral principles.
 
Greece expects you not merely to die for her; she expects you to conquer.
 
I shall fight them!
 
When he is with me, I confess that his arguments are so convincing that I quickly begin to imagine that they are my own. ~ King Constantine I
 
All my life with all my heart I wanted the union of Crete and Greece.
  • 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.
    • Eleftherios Venizelos in:. Histoire diplomatique de la Grèce de 1821 à nos jours. tome V, Edouard Driault et Michel Lheritier, éd. PUF, 1926, p. 164; Venizelos about the decision of Constantine I to keep Greece neutral during WWI.
  • 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.
  • 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!
    • The World Crisis, The Aftermath : Chapter XVIII (Greek Tragedy), Churchill, Butterworth (1929), p. 381.
  • 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.

Victory of Venizelos (1920)

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Eleftherios Venizelos in: Seligman, V. J. (1920). Victory of Venizelos. 

  • One cannot kick against geography!
    • p. 31 ; Part of Venizelos' arguments with king Constantine why Greece should join with the Allies in the World War I.
  • 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.
    • p. 176 ; After one of the many attempts of Venizelos to persuade King Constantine, that Greece should join the Allies in the World War I.
  • I shall fight them!
    • p. 178 ; In reply to the question, "What if you find German troops barring the way?" from the pro-German Greek MP Theotokis in the House. Later, Venizelos was dismissed from office.
  • 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."
    • p. 165; In discussing the responsibility of Zaimis, Venizelos himself remarked in the Greek Chamber.

Quotes about

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  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 180-181
  • 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.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 181-182
  • 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!
    • Kitromilides, P. (2006). Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trials of Statesmanship. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0748624783. , p. 175 ; Minister Georgios Steit describing the persuasiveness ability of Venizelos.
  • 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.
    • Mathiopoulos, Basil P (28/10/2005). A fitting tribute to Venizelos. Athens News.
    • On March 1936, Ioannis Metaxas, an opponent of Venizelos, speaking at a special session of parliament convened to honour Eleftherios Venizelos' contribution.
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