Politics
1. Good administration and politics are characterized by acknowledging rights, the law's superiority, and consciousness of one's duty, as well as by placing responsible people in crude and difficult jobs and skilled and experienced people in refined and delicate jobs.
2. Rather than a government's saying "my nation," it's more important that the nation says "my government." If the nation sees the government as a host of parasites, it means that the body has long since broken off from the head.
3. Government means justice and public order. One cannot speak of government where these do not exist.
4. If the officials running a good and virtuous state are chosen because of their nobility in spirit, ideas, and feelings, the state will be good and strong. A government run by officials who lack these high qualities is still a government, but it is neither good nor long-lasting. Sooner or later, its officials' bad behavior will appear as dark spots on its face and blacken it in the people's eyes.
5. Public officials should be kind, stay within the law, and have soft hearts. These characteristics will protect their esteem and honor and those of the law and the state. Remember that extreme harshness causes unexpected explosions, and extreme softness causes the rapid breeding of harmful ideas.
6. Laws should be effective all the time, everywhere, and for everyone. Those who enforce them should be brave and just so that the masses will have some fear of them, but not to the extent that they no longer trust or feel secure under the law's enforcers.
7. Magnificent nations produce magnificent governments. Generations with high spirituality, scientific power, financial opportunities, and broad consciousness, along with those individuals struggling to be "themselves," form magnificent nations.
8. Unity of feeling, thought, and culture are essential to a nation's strength; any disintegration of religious and moral unity causes it to weaken.
9. There is a policy for everything. The policy for renewing a nation is to ignore your own pleasure, to feel joy only with the nation's pleasures, and to feel sorrow only with its pain.
10. Mature people never make a difference of thought and opinion a means of conflict. However, no one has the right to tolerate those understandings and views that separate people into camps and destroy society. Tolerating division means closing one's eye to the nation's extinction.
11. People who don't think like you might be very sincere and beneficial, so do not oppose every idea that seems contradictory and scare them off. Seek ways to benefit from their opinions and ideas, and strike up a dialogue with them. Otherwise, those who are kept at a distance and led to dissatisfaction because they don't think like us will form huge masses that confront and smash us. Even if such dissatisfied people have never achieved anything positive, the number of states they've destroyed is beyond counting.
12. People must learn how to benefit from other people's knowledge and views, for these can be beneficial to their own system, thought, and world. Especially, they should seek always to benefit from the experiences of the experienced.
13. Those who understand politics as political parties, propaganda, elections, and the struggle for power are mistaken. Politics is the art of management, based on a broad perspective of today, tomorrow, and the day after, that seeks the people's satisfaction and God's approval.
14. Power's dominance is transitory; while that of truth and justice is eternal. Even if these do not exist today, they will be victorious in the very near future. For this reason, sincere politicians should align themselves and their policies with truth and justice. Criteria or Lights of the Way, Izmir 1990, Vol.3, pp. 37-56
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