Ottoman Empire 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, Ottomans

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

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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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like the simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio?

  Julie Burchill

  Looks, Ottomans, Inmates

  "Spare me from the whining women who are giving feminism a bad name" by Julie Burchill, www.theguardian.com. January 28, 2012.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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