Turkish Quotes
More Turkish Quotes
It is now necessary to face the truth and to acknowledge against all prejudices that the struggle that the Albanian tribe is leading today is a natural and unavoidable historic struggle for a different political life than that experienced under Turkish rule – different also from that which its neighbours Serbia, Greece and Montenegro would like to force upon the Albanians.
dimitrije tucović— Review of "Serbia and Albania" by Dimitrije Tucovic
The Malay Peninsula, with the climate of a perpetual Turkish bath.
— 1906 British Malaya.
The hopelessness of the Turkish Government should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures. Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory. Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians as well as Bulgaria for the Bulgarians and Serbia for the Serbians?
william ewart gladstone— Letter quoted in Mr. Gladstone and The Balkan Confederation in The Times (6 February 1897)
Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor.
— Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Kevin White, Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society, p.82
We spend our lives trying to unlock the mystery of the universe, but there was a Turkish prisoner, Bahá'u'lláh, in Akka, Palestine who had the Key.
bahá'u'lláh— Leo Tolstoy, as quoted in Leo Tolstoy and the Bahá? Faith (1985) by Luigi Stendardo, pg 40
The umbrage given to Cuzzoni by her [ Faustina Bordoni's] coming hither, proves that as Turkish monarchs can bear no brother near the throne, an aspiring sister is equally obnoxious to a theatrical Queen.
charles burney— A General History of Music ([1776-89] 1935) vol. 2, page 736
Let us not allow the splits and splintering to frighten us. It is, indeed, a pity, but what can we do, since we are Bulgarians and all suffer from one common disease. If this disease had not been present in our ancestors, from whom we inherited it, they would have never fallen under the sceptre of the Turkish Sultan...
gotse delchev— Letter to Nikola Maleshevski (1 May 1899)
How could a person forget about the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to Anatolia: this was beyond a person’s endurance. I am prepared to gladly sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Montenegrans.
İsmail enver— Quoted in "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility" - by Taner Akcam - History - 2007 - Page 115
There are people who say that "Gül can't be my president". These people don't have good manners for and they should renounce their Turkish citizenship foremost this man will be chosen democratically by the people.
recep tayyip erdoğan— (2007), quoted in the Turkish newspaper Haberturk. [5]
For peace and brotherhood at the axis of a democratic republic, I am ready to serve the Turkish State, and I believe that for this end I must remain alive.
abdullah Öcalan— As quoted in Turkish Press Review (1 June 1999)
The Turkish elements here referred to were shortsighted, fanatical, and yet sincere in their belief. The public encouraged them, and they had the general approval behind them. They were numerous and strong.
mehmed talat— Quoted in "In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century" - Page 53 - by Omer Bartov, Phyllis Mack - Religion – 2001
These different blocs in the Turkish Empire...always conspired against Turkey; because of the hostility of these native peoples, Turkey has lost province after province - Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Egypt, and Tripoli. In this way, the Turkish Empire has dwindled almost to nothing.
mehmed talat— Quoted in "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility" - by Taner Akçam, Paul Bessemer - History - 2006 - Page 92
My fans -- when I see them somewhere, outside my concerts -- I get that, that vibe. They're really supporting my projects and everything, because it's a first time that a Turkish singer is, you know, able to express himself out of Turkey.
tarkan— Tarkan finds his moves take him across borders. CNN Worldbeat. Retrieved on August 9, 1999.
[Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk— As quoted in Ataturk : An Intellectual Biography (2011) by M. Sükrü Hanioglu, p. 38
Our interests require that Egypt should remain what it is, an integral part of the Turkish empire. We do not want it or wish it for ourselves, any more than any rational man with an estate in the North of England and a residence in the South would have wished to possess the inns on the North Road.
temple, henry, 3rd viscount palmerston— Letter to Lord Cowley (25 November 1859), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 542.
We became acquainted we found the people, whether Christian or Turkish, prevailingly of a friendly, kindly, progressive type, as is often the case with simple-minded people in times of peace.
— George Edward White (1940). Adventuring with Anatolia College. Herald-Register. pp. p. 18.
I always liked the common Turkish people unless they were stirred to passion by militarists.
— George Edward White (1940). Adventuring with Anatolia College. Herald-Register. pp. p. 18.
The two present threats to Turkish territorial integrity by the Greeks and the French and the one potential threat an Armenian state reproduced the proximate CUP ‘rationale’ for the 1915 16 genocide, and the forthcoming violence was sometimes of the same order.
— Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, p.150
Deuce Bigalow: Do you really think that all a woman wants, is for some man to give her a "Mud Pretzel", "Turkish Snow Cone", or an..."Irish Facial"?
— Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005), directed by Mike Bigelow; written by Harris Goldberg, Rob Schneider, David Garrett, and Jason Ward.
A discussion of the Armenian Genocide could reveal that this Turkish state was not a result of a war fought against the imperial powers, but, on the contrary, a product of the war against the Greek and Armenian minorities. It could show that a significant part of the National Forces consisted either of murderers who directly participated in the Armenian Genocide or of thieves who had become rich by plundering Armenian possessions.
— Taner Akçam, historian and sociologist in The Genocide of Armenians and the silence of the Turks
Surely a few Armenians aided and abetted our enemy, and a few Armenian Deputies committed crimes against the Turkish nation... it is incumbent upon a government to pursue the guilty ones. Unfortunately, our wartime leaders, imbued with a spirit of brigandage, carried out the law of deportation in a manner that could surpass the proclivities of the most bloodthirsty bandits. They decided to exterminate the Armenians, and they did exterminate them.
— Mustafa Arif, Ottoman Minister of Interior after Mehmed Talat Pasha (13 December 1918)
Jamal Pasha [then Turkish military ruler in Palestine] planned from the outset to destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz Yisrael, exactly as they did the Armenians in Armenia
— David Ben-Gurion, in a letter to his father from 1919, as reported by Yair Auron in The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide - p 325
I, as an ethnically Turkish citizen, am not guilty, but am responsible for what happened to the Armenians in 1915. I did an analysis of the Deputies of the first National Assembly, I have found enough documentation that implicates about 25-30% of the Deputies of having participated in the massacres against the Armenians... Not only was there no accountability and no punishment for those who committed crimes against the Armenians, but many of the perpetrators unfortunately then became leaders of the Turkish Republic.
— Dr. Fatma Müge Göçek, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, in Turkey, the European Union and the Armenian Question — a presention given before the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights (2 December 2005)
The evidence...from German, Austrian and Turkish sources in my view leads inescapably to the conclusion that the extermination of the Armenians was actually planned by a clique within the Young Turk leadership and executed by the sinister Special Organization [Teshkilati Mahsusa] of the army.
— Dominic Lieven in Empire (2001) Yale University Press. Lieven is a well known British historian, a Pofessor of History at the London School of Economics and former Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.
The decision to expel the woman, children and old men, was the result of a hatred against the Armenians, and involved a wild objective on the part of the Turkish government to obliterate this race... the massive arrests of the men were carried out not only in the near of the front but throughout the empire... and in the corridors of the Turkish Ministry of War one heard people tell with cynical grins the story of how all these thousands died a natural death or how they were victims of accidents as registered in official records...
— George Mayer, Prof. Dr. Colonel, Deputy Chief in the Department of Heath of the Turkish Army
In a realisation of their plan to resolve the Armenian Question by destroying the Armenian race, the Turkish Government is not stopped neither by our representatives, nor by the public opinion of the west.
— Comte Paul Wolff Metternich in a dispatch to the Chancellor Von Bethmann-Holweg (10 July 1919)
Pamuk has made groundless claims against the Turkish identity, the Turkish military and Turkey as a whole. He should be punished for violating Articles 159 and 312 of the Turkish penal code. He made a statement provoking the people to hatred and animosity through the media, which is defined as a crime in Article 312.
— Orhan Pekmezci, Kayseri Bar Association Attorney upon filing charges against Pamuk for violations of Turkish Penal Code (2005)
[When asked what Turkish people think about the Armenian Genocide] Sadly, young people in Turkey know nothing about the subject, All they know is nationalist things written in school textbooks. And because they lack that knowledge, they believe that the Armenians plot bad things against their country. ... maybe future generations will address the subject in a more reasonable and calm manner.
— Yeftan Turkyilmaz, Turkish researcher who has worked in Armenian State archives, in an interview with Gayane Danielian - E/RL (11 May 2005)
