Turkmenistan Quotes

“The most pleasant and pure feeling is to live with a sense of being part of the Motherland, because exactly this feeling spares [us] from loneliness.”
― Saparmurat Niyazov

“At the moment of my betrayal to my motherland, to her sacred banner, to Saparmurat Turkmenbashy, let my breath stop.”
― Turkmen poem

“When agents of the Turkmen secret police came up short in arrests of counterrevolutionaries in 1937-38, they filled their quota by going to the Ashgabat marketplace and rounding up all men who wore beards, on theory that they were likely to be mullahs.”
― Douglas Northrop

“It is impossible to hide any more of his (Turkmenbashy) pure hypocrisy, the absence of elementary norms of political and diplomatic behavior, the insidiousness and cruelty in relation to the people and the spreading of an atmosphere of fear.”
― Boris Sheikhmuradov

“All this will pass in a few years, when the people no longer depend on me. The Turkmens have always bowed to something; once it was fire, then Islam, then Marx... the people have to believe in something.”
― Saparmurat Niyazov

“Some people approached me saying they would like to raise a monument to me like they do in Turkmenistan for Turkmenbashy, I asked, what for? Astana is my memorial.”
― Nursultan Nazarbayev

“We’re old men now, it’s obvious. Most of us are gone and few remain. That's justice anyway: You ate, you lived, you saw good and evil, you suffered what you had to suffer, and you had your children. Then, all at once and before you know it, you're sent on your way. As for you lot though, this is what I'm trying to say: It's better to be ignorant and useful than learned and useless.”
― Ak Welsapar, The Tale of Aypi

“Here is a perfectly grotesque example of such compromise. US senator Alan Cranston reportedly said, after a visit to Turkmenistan, sounding like Türkmenbaşy himself, ‘Of course, you don’t build a democratic state in a day. In America, we’ve been at it 200 years, and even here it isn’t perfect. In my opinion, Turkmenistan is slowly but surely walking a path toward a democratic society and economic transition’.”
― Dmitrii Furman, Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System

“You know, there's only one real competition in this world, and that's the battle of the sexes. See, war between religions, nations, and militaries will end someday, but the battle of the sexes is eternal.”
― Ak Welsapar, The Tale of Aypi