Ottoman Quotes - page 2
The life of this people greatly accords with my taste, which is naturally somewhat indolent and melancholy... To repose on voluptuous ottomans and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxuries of a bath which requires half a dozen attendants for its perfection; to court the air in a carved caïque, by shores which are a perpetual scene; and to find no exertion greater than a canter on a barb; this is, I think, a far more sensible life than all the bustle of clubs, all the boring of drawing-rooms, and all the coarse vulgarity of our political controversies.
Benjamin Disraeli
Greek Phanariot merchants and traders dominated the commerce of the Ottoman empire, utilizing their kinship networks and social and religious institutions to maximize not only their business and assets, but also their cultural capital. Diaspora Greeks became especially prominent from the eighteenth century in the development of printing and the press, and experienced a major intellectual revival in cities as far afield as Vienna, Venice, Odessa, Paris, and Amsterdam.
Anthony D. Smith
But perhaps the most significant factor in the turn to a Greek ethnicism, which resisted both the Turkish turban and the Latin mitre in the years before the fall of Constantinople, was the opposition of the urban populace, led by the Orthodox party, monks, and priests, to the wealthy urban classes and the Byzantine court. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, recognition by the Turks of the Greek millet under its Patriarch and Church helped to ensure the persistence of a separate ethnic identity, which, even if it did not produce a ‘precocious nationalism' among the Greeks, provided the later Greek enlighteners and nationalists with a cultural constituency fed by political dreams and apocalyptic prophecies of the recapture of Constantinople and the restoration of Greek Byzantium and its Orthodox emperor in all his glory.
Anthony D. Smith
I have pursued a lone heresy of wondering why NATO even survived the end of its enemies, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Do we still maintain alliances against Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans? I can find no trace of them. Perhaps, overlooked in some elegant Paris street and living off ancient funds, elderly, learned men still occupy these joyous sinecures, hoping that they will not be found out.
Peter Hitchens