And because these principles are true, we must not forget that there is a good education, the one that frees and helps man to complete himself according to himself, and a bad education, the one that distorts and dries up and is an industry that produces the falsely educated and the nouveau-riches of learning, who have the same false courtesy as the nouveau-riches of money.”
“We say and find out every day that we live in a moral chaos. And this, at a time when never before has the distribution of the elements of our material existence been done with such a system, such a military, I would say, order, such an inexorable control. The contradiction is instructive. When in two branches one hypertrophies, the other atrophies. A laudable urge to unite the peoples of Europe into a single unit is today being overlooked by the impossibility of bringing together the atrophied and hypertrophied branches of our culture. Our values, they are not a common language either.”
“If language was just a means of communication, there would be no problem. But it also happens to be a tool of magic and a carrier of moral values. Language acquires a certain ethos over the centuries. And this ethos creates obligations. Without anyone forgetting that in the span of twenty-five centuries there was not one, I repeat not one, that poetry was not written in the Greek language. What is the great burden of tradition that this instrument carries. New Greek poetry presents it in relief”.
“It is not enough to dream with the lyrics. It’s a little. It is not enough to politicize. Is very. Deep down, the material world is just a bunch of stuff. The end result will depend on whether we are good or bad architects. The Heaven or Hell we will build. If Poetry provides an assurance, especially in dürftiger (hazy) times, it is precisely this: that our fate is nevertheless in our hands.”
From the press conference given on October 19, 1979, at the Great Britain Hotel on the announcement of the awarding of the Greek poet with the Nobel Prize in Literature. You can find it as an audio document.
