We're stuck. We're stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalist, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side.

Submission does not mean being weak or passive. It leads to neither fatalism nor capitulation. Just the opposite. True power resides in submission. A power that comes from within. Those who submit to the divine essence of life will live in unperturbed tranquility and peace even when the whole wide world goes through turbulence after turbulence.

Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one is smaller.

The digital world is developing with such force and such a pace that you simply can't ban or control it. People want to be globally connected.

But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die

After the Ankara bombings on October 10, people were asked to hold a minute of silence, but many refused. Our society can't even unite in grief to honor the victims. We've lost our empathy. That's maybe the worst.

Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.