My humble body will surely one day return to the earth, but the Turkish Republic shall endure forever.
Benim naçiz vücudum elbet bir gün toprak olacaktır, fakat Türkiye Cumhuriyeti ilelebet payidar kalacaktır.
Politicians
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Founding president of the Republic of Turkey (1881-1938, president 1923-1938). As an Ottoman officer he repelled the Allies at Gallipoli in 1915, then led the Turkish War of Independence after the empire's collapse. In 1923 he proclaimed the republic and over the next decade abolished the sultanate and caliphate, replaced Arabic script with Latin letters, introduced a civil code modelled on Switzerland, granted women's suffrage in 1934, and was awarded the surname Atatürk ("Father of the Turks") by parliament. His record also includes the banning of the Progressive Republican Party in 1925 and the violent suppression of the 1937-38 Dersim Kurdish rebellion, recently acknowledged by the Turkish state as a massacre.
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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Other Quotes
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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
How happy is the one who says 'I am a Turk.'
-- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
We who have lived in the universities of Germany owe it to our science and to ourselves to refuse to teach where the freedom of teaching has been destroyed.
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