Politics & Power Quote by Melina Mercouri

Mercouri’s line lands because it refuses to grovel while still sounding almost disarmingly polite. She opens with a fact the British can’t dispute - “almost two centuries” - then immediately concedes competence: you “cared for them as well as you could.” That thank-you isn’t softness; it’s strategy. By granting the museum its self-image as steward, she disarms the standard defense (“we saved them”) and clears space to argue the only point that matters: legitimacy.

The pivot is the real move. “But now” turns custodianship into an expired lease. Time, in her framing, doesn’t launder the original removal; it only proves how long an imbalance has been normalized. And she doesn’t litigate paperwork. She indicts the moral atmosphere: “fairness and morality.” Those are deliberately non-technical words, aimed at public opinion more than a courtroom, and they signal a post-imperial cultural moment in which old trophies start to look like liabilities.

As an actress-turned-politician and Greece’s former culture minister, Mercouri understood performance as power. She stages Britain as the reasonable adult who can choose to do the right thing, casting restitution not as a humiliating surrender but as a dignified act. “Please give them back” reads simple, almost domestic, which is the point: take this out of the museum’s marble solemnity and put it where everyday ethics live. The subtext is sharp: if you truly respect these works, prove it by relinquishing them.