I read Andrew Mango's Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey because I went on vacation to Turkey recently and thought I'd do some homework before enjoying my time. So, who is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk?

Mustafa Kemal (perfection) Atatürk (father of the Turks) was born in 1881 as an Ottoman in the Greek city of Salónica, and he learned humanist philosophies from French literature. His career started in the military, but gradually he entered into politics, and eventually, he evolved into a position of dictatorship. He and the men around him fought against foreign powers, trying to chomp at the sides of the dying Ottoman Empire, and reinvented the Anatolian lands into a modern and secular nation-state we all know today as Turkey.

His leadership skills are inspiring, for he led by example, but his character, like the rest of us, is filled with contradictions. As I believe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, his greatness was in his achievement to thrust forward a patchwork of small and superstitious tribes into a nation underpinned by reason and civility.

My takeaway from this book is the importance of critical thinking, sound judgment, and having an individual moral compass. I think we are living in highly liquid times where our sense of safety, security, and well-being are unraveling underneath us. But even with such uncertainties, universal virtues like reason, courage, patience, and humility can and will mend our times towards the truth.

I leave everyone here with quotes from the book I found motivating.

'Greatness means that you won't try and please anyone, that you won't deceive anyone, that you will discern the true ideal for the country, that you will strive for it, that everyone will turn against you, and will try to make you change your course. You will make no means to resist. They will pile up endless obstacles in your path, and you will surmount them, knowing all the time that you are not great, but little, weak, resourceless, a mere nothing, and that no one will come to your aid. And if after that they call you great, you'll laugh at them.'

'Strength of intellect and character don't always prevail. Important services which the country expects are sometimes withheld because of emotion and ambition. People who determine our destiny should be able to manage men whatever their level or morals.'

'History has proved incontrovertibly that success in great enterprises requires the presence of a leader of unshakable capacity and power.'

'In Turkish, as in other traditional cultures skill in man-management is the essence of feminine wisdom.'

'It is a disgrace for a civilized society to appeal for help to the dead.'

'Victory is won by the man who says "Victory is mine", success belongs to him who starts by saying "I will be successful" and can then say "I have succeeded"'. He was clearly in a determined mood.

'Some people imply I am a Jew because I was born in Salónica.' He said one day to his childhood friend, Nuri (Conker), 'But one must not forget that Napoleon was an Italian from Corsica. Yet he died a Frenchman and has passed into history as a Frenchman. People must serve the society in which they find themselves.'