Ismail Enver Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

We can then use Platonic means to quiet Armenians and Greeks, but in time of war we cannot investigate and negotiate. We must act promptly and with determination. I also think that the Armenians are making a mistake in depending upon the Russians. The Russians really would rather see them killed than alive. They are as great a danger to the Russians as they are to us. If they should form an independent government in Turkey, the Armenians in Russia would attempt to form an independent government there.

Ismail Enver
The threat could be eliminated by removing the Armenians from the places where they lived and sending them to other places.

Ismail Enver
Ah, my brave Arabs! If I could only gather them in from all their desert ways, and arm them properly... But I fear it cannot be. They are drifting in by tens and scores, where I need hundreds and thousands.

Ismail Enver
The transformation of the Islamic world into one of revolution, as His Majesty has desired, had been in preparation for some time and had now been put into action.

Ismail Enver
We are taking care of our troops today, hence their loyalty. Formerly a rifle was given to a man and he had to shift for himself.

Ismail Enver
How could a person forget about the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to Anatolia: this was beyond a person's endurance. I am prepared to gladly sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Montenegrans.

Ismail Enver
All who seek to enrich those who do not work should be destroyed.

Ismail Enver
How can we furnish bread to the Armenians when we can't get enough for our own people? I know that they are suffering and that it is quite likely that they cannot get bread at all this coming winter. But we have the utmost difficulty in getting flour and clothing right here in Constantinople.

Ismail Enver
The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation.

Ismail Enver
Real Turkish unification is my dearest wish, and any international political arrangement which will leave me a free hand to work for that, I will subscribe to. Turkey contains a great many Christians as well as Mohammedans. The latter I would regenerate from within, not from without. The West has little that we need save battleships and shrapnels, and if it would leave us alone we would not need even these.

Ismail Enver