Life & Wisdom Quote by Giorgos Seferis

Seferis, the poet-diplomat who watched Europe’s moral language buckle under war and statecraft, is doing something sly here: he’s laundering the ugly parts of leadership through the clean rhetoric of results. “Egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning” read like a prosecutor’s list, not a résumé. Yet he pivots on a single social truth: we don’t evaluate power by its character; we evaluate it by its deliverables. The same traits that make someone unbearable in a room become “high qualities” once they’re yoked to “great ends.” Seferis isn’t blessing these vices so much as exposing our complicity in rebranding them.

The subtext is a warning about moral accounting. Action, especially public action, requires a certain emotional insulation and strategic flexibility; the world rarely rewards the tender-hearted operator. But Seferis underscores how quickly necessity becomes alibi. “Means to achieve” is the loaded phrase: it frames ethics as instrumental, not intrinsic, and it invites the oldest political seduction - that greatness retroactively purifies the methods used to obtain it.

Context matters: Seferis lived through occupation, civil conflict, exile, and later the Greek junta. In such climates, “great ends” are constantly invoked, often by men who are very good at hardness and cunning and very vague about the endgame. His line captures the frightening elasticity of public admiration: we don’t just forgive flaws in successful actors; we canonize them as virtues once the story comes out victorious.