Ottomans Quotes

• The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Powerful, Sick, Body

  "Persian Letters". Book by Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, No. 19, 1721.

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• I just don't think it's very dignified to ask people to like you. You can just wind up being somebody's ottoman.

  Mos Def

  Thinking, Wind, People

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• So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for
  f-k all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

  Eddie Izzard

  Europe, Turkeys, Empires

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• The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Differences, Boss, Needs

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.1728, Random House

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• When Turkey began approaching the EU, I wasn't the only one who worried that the dark stain in Turkey's history - or rather the history of the Ottoman Empire - could become a problem one day. In other words, what happened to the Armenians in World War I. That's why I couldn't leave the issue untouched.

  Orhan Pamuk

  War, Dark, Turkeys

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• Turkey in general became too involved with what is happening in Egypt and in Syria. Some politicians with neo-Ottoman dreams developed this idea of being a major player in the Middle East, which hasn't gone as expected.

  Elif Safak

  Dream, Player, Egypt

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Israel, the Israelis, and the rest of the world have been brainwashed. They don't think of pre-1948, they have no idea Palestinians were in Israel, who we were before '48. As if we were born in 1948 according to them. They have no notion that we had a country, houses, rebelled against the Ottomans and the British. They think history in that region started in that moment.

  Elia Suleiman

  Country, Thinking, Israel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: madden horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.

  Cory Doctorow

  Coffee, Black, Wikipedia

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• If clothes look like a couch or an ottoman or a love seat, you just wanna stay away from it.

  Santino Rice

  Clothes, Looks, Couches

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• Tayyip Erdoğan is megalomaniac President, he is not stable. He lives during the Ottoman era, he doesn't live in the current time. He's out of touch with the reality.

  Bashar al-Assad

  Reality, President, Eras

  Source: www.globalresearch.ca

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• From May until October, the Ottoman Government pursued methodically a plan of extermination far more hellish than the worst possible massacre. Orders for deportation of the entire Armenian population to Mesopotamia were dispatched to every province of Asia Minor. These orders were explicit and detailed. No hamlet was too insignificant to be missed. The news was given by town criers that every Armenian was to be ready to leave at a certain hour for an unknown destination.

  Herbert Adams Gibbons

  Order, Government, May

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• The Ottoman Empire . . . The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much - were mostly interested in robbing them - and they left them alone to run their own affairs . . . with a lot of local self determination.

  Noam Chomsky

  Running, Determination, Self

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• With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President
  Obama ... is stepping once again - and with understandably great reluctance - into the chaos
  of an entire civilization that has broken down. Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but
  gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism -
  the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition-than at any time since the collapse of the
  Ottoman Empire a century ago.

  Hisham Melhem

  Islamic, Civilization, Broken

  "The Barbarians Within Our Gates" by Hisham Melhem, www.politico.com. September 18, 2014.

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• In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.

  Charles C. Mann

  Powerful, Russia, Aztec

  Charles C. Mann (2006). “1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”, p.74, Vintage

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• Peace is an Excellent Thing, and War is a great Misfortune. But there are Many things More valuable than Peace, and many Things Much worse than war. The maintenance of the Ottoman Empire belongs to the First Class, the Occupation of Turkey by Russia belongs to the Second.

  Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

  Peace, War, Russia

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• 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 E. Gladstone

  Country, Government, Greek

  "Mr. Gladstone and The Balkan Confederation". "The Sunday Times" Newspaper, February 6, 1897.

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• We're stuck. We're stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalist, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side.

  Elif Safak

  Army, Past, Hands

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• On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed.

  Eliot Engel

  War, Two, World

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• Euphemisms, vague terminology or calls for discussions with Turkey to get at the truth are just some of the dodges Congress and the administration have used to avoid Turkish discomfort with its Ottoman past.

  Adam Schiff

  Past, Turkeys, Administration

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• Sublime tobacco! which from east to west, Cheers the tar's labour or the Turkman's rest; Which on the Moslem's ottoman divides His hours, and rivals opium and his brides; Magnificent in Stamboul, but less grand, Though not less loved, in Wapping or the Strand: Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe, When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe; Like other charmers wooing the caress, More dazzlingly when daring in full dress; Yet thy true lovers more admire by far Thy naked beauties Give me a cigar!

  Lord Byron

  Cheer, Giving, Sublime

  Lord Byron (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)”, p.1029, Delphi Classics

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• We join Armenians around the world as we remember the terrible massacres suffered in 1915-1923 at the hands of the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. The United States responded to this crime against humanity by leading diplomatic and private relief efforts.

  George H. W. Bush

  Hands, Effort, Humanity

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• But worse things were about to be found in the bedroom: on the jeweller’s wife’s ottoman, in a casual pose, sprawled a third party- namely, a black cat of uncanny size, with a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to spear a pickled mushroom, in the other. , The Master and Magarita

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Party, Cat, Glasses

  Mikhail Bulgakov (2016). “THE MASTER AND MARGARITA: 50th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.74, Penguin

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• In April, 1915, the Ottoman Government began to put into execution throughout Turkey a systematic and carefully-prepared plan to exterminate the Armenian race. In six months nearly a million Armenians have been killed. The number of victims and the manner of their destruction are without parallel in Modern History.

  Herbert Adams Gibbons

  Turkeys, Numbers, Race

  Herbert Adams Gibbons (1916). “The Blackest Page of Modern History: Events in Armenia in 1915 : The Facts and the Responsibilities”

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• An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein - and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.

  David Frum

  Usa, Tyrants, Iraq

  David Frum (2003). “The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush”, p.164, Random House

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• Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correcta nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion andurgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protectits religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish HolyLand of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades maderight.

  Scott Anderson

  Christian, Religious, War

  Scott Anderson (2014). “Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, p.234, Atlantic Books Ltd

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