General Allenby: You acted without orders, you know.
T.E. Lawrence: Shouldn't officers use their initiative at all times?
General Allenby: Not really. It's awfully dangerous.
Prince Feisal: You, I suspect, are chief architect of this compromise. What do you think?
Mr. Dryden: Me, your Highness? On the whole, I wish I'd stayed in Tunbridge Wells.
Auda abu Tayi: It is Auda of the Howitat who speaks.
Sherif Ali: It is Ali of the Harith who answers.
Auda abu Tayi: Harith! Ali, does your father still steal?
Sherif Ali: No. Does Auda take me for one of his own bastards?
Auda abu Tayi: No, there is no resemblance. Alas, you resemble your father.
Sherif Ali: Auda flatters me.
Auda abu Tayi: You're easily flattered. I knew your father well.
Sherif Ali: Did you know your own?
Sherif Ali: There is the railway. And that is the desert. From here until we reach the other side, no water but what we carry with us. For the camels, no water at all. If the camels die, we die. And in twenty days they will start to die.
T.E. Lawrence: There's no time to waste, then, is there?
General Allenby: I'm promoting you Major.
T.E. Lawrence: I don't think that's a very good idea.
Mr. Dryden: Lawrence, only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert: Bedouins and gods, and you're neither. Take it from me, for ordinary men, it's a burning, fiery furnace.
T.E. Lawrence: No, Dryden, it's going to be fun.
Mr. Dryden: It is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun.
General Murray: I can't make out whether you're bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted.
T.E. Lawrence: I have the same problem, sir.
Prince Feisal: To be great again, it seems that we need the english... or.
T.E. Lawrence: Or?
Prince Feisal: What no man can provide, Mr. Lawrence. We need a miracle.
General Allenby: I fight like Clausewitz, then you fight like Saxe.
T.E. Lawrence: We should do very well, then, shouldn't we?
Auda abu Tayi: The desert has dried up more blood than you can think of.
Auda abu Tayi: What ails the Englishman?
Sherif Ali: The one he killed is the one he brought out of the Nafud.
Auda abu Tayi: It was written then. Better to have left him there.
T.E. Lawrence: I cannot fiddle but I can make a great state of a small city.
T.E. Lawrence: I'm to "assess the situation."
Colonel Brighton: Hmph! Well that won't be too difficult. The situation's bloody awful.
T.E. Lawrence: I killed two people. One was... yesterday? He was just a boy and I led him into quicksand. The other was... well, before Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something about it that I didn't like.
General Allenby: That's to be expected.
T.E. Lawrence: No, something else.
General Allenby: Well, then let it be a lesson.
T.E. Lawrence: No... something else.
General Allenby: What then?
T.E. Lawrence: I enjoyed it.
Auda abu Tayi: Thine mother mated with a scorpion.
Prince Feisal: Which is why my father made this war upon the Turks. My father, Mr Lawrence, not the English. But my father is old and I... I long for the vanished gardens of Cordoba. However, before the gardens must come the fighting.
Sherif Ali: Does it surprise you, Mr Bentley? Surely, you know the Arabs are a barbarous people. Barbarous and cruel. Who but they! Who but they.
T.E. Lawrence: Look, Ali. If any of your Beduin arrived in Cairo and said: "We've taken Aqaba" the generals would laugh.
Sherif Ali: I see. In Cairo you will put off these funny clothes. You'll wear trousers and tell stories of our quaintness and barbarity and then they will believe you.
T.E. Lawrence: You're an ignorant man.
Prince Feisal: There's nothing further here for a warrior. We drive bargains. Old men's work. Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men. Courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace. And the vices of peace are the vices of old men. Mistrust and caution. It must be so.
Colonel Brighton: Damn it, Lawrence! Who do you take your orders from?
