Kemal Ataturk Quotes

Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.

Science is the most reliable guide in life.

The biggest battle is the war against ignorance.

Eğitim, kültür ve bilgi aydınlığa açılan en geniş penceredir.

Why after my years of education, after studying the secular civilization and the socialization process, should i decent to the level of common people, i will make them rise to my level, let me not resemble them, they should resemble me!

Bir ülke için en büyük kahraman, milletine ilerici bir vizyon, barışçıl bir ruh, modern bir zihin ve bilime sarsılmaz bir inanç veren kişidir. Ve Türkler için bu şerefli isim Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’tür, ölümsüz bir devrimci!

The greatest hero for a country is the person who gave a progressive vision, a peaceful soul, a modern mind and an unshakable belief in science to his nation. And for the Turks, this honorable name is Atatürk, an immortal revolutionist!

I've got to drink: my mind keeps on working hard and fast to the point of suffering. I have to slow it down and rest it at times.. when I don't drink, I can't sleep, and the distress stupefies me.

Kemal (who would later take the name Ataturk) went on to lead the Turkish National Movement in a war against Greece, winning back territory the Ottomans had forfeited. In 1923 Kemal would preside over the creation of the secular nation of Turkey. For that reason, secular Turks have long viewed the battle of Canakkale as marking the birth of their modern society.

Harbord and his mission arrived in Sivas on 20 September. They were told by Mustafa Kemal that Turkey realized that it needed the aid of an impartial foreign country. ‘After all our experience we are sure that America is the only country able to help us,’ Mustafa Kemal acknowledged in a statement on 15 October.

The new secular republic reflected Mustafa Kemal’s personal philosophy. In a book published in 1928, Grace Ellison quotes him as saying to her, presumably in 1926–7: I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow-men.31 Yet, like many rationalists, Mustafa Kemal was himself superstitious and sought omens in dreams.32 When he inspected the front in March 1922, during the War of Independence, he had portions of the Koran recited during evening gatherings with commanders.33 But now he was out of the wood.

The assembly expressed its Islamic feelings on 14 September when it passed a law prohibiting alcohol. This did not stop Mustafa Kemal from obtaining his regular supply of raki.

After visiting the Krupp factories, the Turkish party spent ten days in Berlin, where Vahdettin told a German journalist that women had begun to work in public in Turkey, and that although progress was slow, ‘we are making the effort to give equal rights to our women’.88 Mustafa Kemal was not alone in favouring women’s emancipation in the Ottoman state.

Since 1744, the protection and propagation of Islam has remained the Al Saud dynasty’s motivating ideology. It contributed significantly to the success of King Abdulaziz’s nation-building program and was a strategic choice at odds with that of more secular nationalist Muslim leaders such as Mustapha Kemal Ataturk or the Shah of Iran.

For centuries, the Ottoman Sultans had been recognized as Caliphs—for Sunnis the spiritual successors of the Prophet Mohammed. In 1924, the leader of post-Ottoman Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, constitutionally abolished the Caliphate.

Erdogan was himself a radical Islamicist. He was busy transforming Turkey from Kemal Ataturk’s secular state into an Islamicist state.

Like King Faisal, but unlike Mustapha Kemal Ataturk in Turkey or Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, Mohammed bin Salman would also make an effort to preserve the dignity, influence, and incomes of the clerics.

Whatever it did to Churchill, Gallipoli saw the birth of a nation, or rather two. By no remote consequence of the campaign, Mustafa Kemal would become Kemal Ataturk, while the rump of the Ottoman Empire became a Turkish national state under his leadership. And Australia would change also. The headstone of one Australian infantryman bears the words, chosen by his parents, ‘When day break, duty done for King and Country,’ but that was not how later generations of Australians would feel. ‘From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget’ was the quaint slogan advertising the 1981 Australian movie Gallipoli, which helped launch Mel Gibson’s career, but every Australian has heard of it.

Akçam citó incluso a Mustafá Kemal Ataturk, el fundador del Estado turco, quien el 23 de abril de 1920 denunció las «matanzas armenias» en tanto que «acto vergonzoso».

Mustafa Kemal was convinced, and ordered that the theory should be taught at the new university in Ankara. He told a young French financial expert, Hervé Alphand, that his name was Turkish as it comprised the words alp (champion) and han (or khan, a ruler). In confirmation, Mustafa Kemal felt Alphand’s skull: it was, he decided, brachycephalic, the characteristic skull-shape of the Turkish race.11

In short, none of the destructive fantasies that have taken possession of leaders in our own age, from Kemal Ataturk to Stalin, from the Khans of the Kremlin to the Kahns of the Pentagon, were foreign to the souls of the divinely appointed founders of the first machine civilization. With every increase of effective power, extravagantly sadistic and murderous impulses erupted out of the unconscious. This is the trauma that has distorted the subsequent development of all 'civilized' societies. And it is this fact that punctuates the entire history of mankind with outbursts of collective paranoia and tribal delusions of grandeur, mingled with malevolent suspicions, murderous hatreds, and atrociously inhumane acts.

Aramızda Milli Mücadelenin askerlik cephesini başaracak başka arkadaşlar da vardı. Ama savaştan sonra yeni bir Türkiye yaratacak tek kişi, Mustafa Kemal Paşa’dır. O olmasaydı, biz birbirimizi yerdik. Abbasi devleti gibi ‘’Tevaif-i mülük’’ halinde paramparça olurduk.

The struggle within Turkey that continues to this day is the legacy of Kemal Ataturk’s radical reformation,

vision, of the Ittihadists and, by extension, Kemal Ataturk, did not include the non-Muslim population of what was once the Ottoman Empire.

The Kemal-ist way to “make politics”— to wage war against the Entente for an honorable peace— was viewed as “active politics” par excellence. The opposite was what the papers diagnosed in the case of Germany: ful-fi llment politics, which in their eyes was either “passive politics” or not even politics at all. The Kladderadatsch cartoon “How to Revise a Peace Treaty” summarized this debate and Turkey’s role- model function perfectly. It ruled out historians, diplomats, and politi-cians as agents of revision. The one who achieves revision is a Turk, “saber in hand”—“action” instead of “talk.