Quotes About Ataturk

I felt grateful to Ataturk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren't held back by superstition or religion, that they were true scientists who taught me how to read when I was three and never doubted that I could become a writer.

My father believed very strongly in Ataturk. Ataturk was a very powerful man and a man of great vision.

I have established the republic. But today it is not clear whether the form of government is a republic, a dictatorship, or personal rule.

I am pleased, with a feeling of good fortune, to be from Selanik. If you want to know the truth better, I feel that my chest is overflowing with a feeling of pride.

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».

Al Qaeda's leaders seek to reverse what they claim are corrupt Islamic practices bookended by the Mongol invasions in 1256 and Ataturk's ending the caliphate in 1924. Theirs is a fight to turn Islam's clock back to the time of Prophet Muhammad's original followers.

I grew up hearing that if it hadn't been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been 'a covered person' who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher.

Under the treaty of Sevres in 1920 Greece had been given Smyrna, and by 1922 the Greek army was trying to push its way up the Aegean coast. The Turks, however, had found a leader in Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Atatürk) with no regard for treaties and a committed hatred of the Greeks. He drove their army back into Smyrna, and then did what any Turkish leader would have done: massacred them.

Many axes are being kept under cover, waiting in ambush, ready to pounce, when we resign. Have no worries. We will deliver this homeland to you perfectly clean, as it was in Atatürk's time.

impact of this makeover has been to significantly impede historical research, and it is one of Ataturk's most devastating accomplishments.

My father was in Ataturk's closest group. They lived together during the War of Liberation in Turkey.

Without Ataturk's vision, without his ambition and energy, without his astonishing boldness in sweeping away traditions accumulated over centuries, today's Turkey would not exist, and the world would be much poorer.

Ataturk sent several Turkish staff officers to Afghanistan, helped them build their own army.

Ataturk approved of the mevlevi dervish approach to God as being 'an expression of Turkish genius' that reclaimed Islam from what he saw as hide-bound, backward Arab tradition.

With astonishing consistency, the people of Kültepe and Duttepe all saw the same figures in their dreams at regular intervals: Boys: the female primary-school teacher Girls: Atatürk Men: the Holy Prophet Muhammad Women: a tall, anonymous Western film star Old men: an angel drinking milk Old women: a young postman bringing good news

He also gives a good picture of the profound chaos unleashed in Muslim countries in 1924 by Ataturk's sudden abolition of the caliphate, an institution they had superficially not taken much notice of but which was central to a Muslim's whole identity.

There is much to justify Turkey's reverence for Ataturk. He is the force that allowed Turkey to rise from the ashes of defeat and emerge as a vibrant new nation.

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader's fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, 'the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization'. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.