- [Lawrence has just extinguished a match between his thumb and forefinger. William Potter surreptitiously attempts the same]
- William Potter: Ooh! It damn well 'urts!
- T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
- Officer: What's the trick then?
- T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
- Prince Feisal: No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.
- Mr. Dryden: If we've been telling lies, you've been telling half-lies. A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.
- T.E. Lawrence: My friends, we have been foolish. Auda will not come to Aqaba. Not for money...
- Auda abu Tayi: No.
- T.E. Lawrence: ...for Feisal...
- Auda abu Tayi: No!
- T.E. Lawrence: ...nor to drive away the Turks. He will come... because it is his pleasure.
- [pause]
- Auda abu Tayi: Thy mother mated with a scorpion.
- 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.
- 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.
- Jackson Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?
- T.E. Lawrence: It's clean.
- 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?
- Auda abu Tayi: Serve. *I serve*?
- T.E. Lawrence: It is the servant who takes money.
- Auda abu Tayi: I am Auda abu Tayi! Does Auda serve?
- Howeitat tribesmen: NO!
- Auda abu Tayi: Does Auda abu Tayi serve?
- Howeitat tribesmen: [louder] NO!
- Auda abu Tayi: [to Lawrence] I carry twenty-three great wounds, all got in battle. Seventy-five men have I killed with my own hands in battle. I scatter, I burn my enemies' tents. I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure, yet I am poor! Because *I* am a river to my people!
- Howeitat tribesmen: [cheer loudly]
- Auda abu Tayi: Is that service?
- T.E. Lawrence: [mouths] No.
- Prince Feisal: Gasim's time has come, Lawrence. It is written.
- T.E. Lawrence: Nothing is written.
- Sherif Ali: You will not be at Aqaba, English! Go back, blasphemer... but you will not be at Aqaba!
- T.E. Lawrence: I shall be at Aqaba. That, IS written.
- [pointing to forehead]
- T.E. Lawrence: In here.
- Prince Feisal: With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.
- Colonel Brighton: Are you badly hurt?
- T.E. Lawrence: I'm not hurt at all. Didn't you know? They can only kill me with a golden bullet.
- 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.
- 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.
- [asked by reporter if he knew Lawrence]
- Jackson Bentley: Yes, it was my privilege to know him and to make him known to the world. He was a poet, a scholar and a mighty warrior.
- [after reporter leaves]
- Jackson Bentley: He was also the most shameless exhibitionist since Barnum & Bailey.
- T.E. Lawrence: So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people - greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.
- Sherif Ali: I do not understand this. Your father's name is Chapman...
- T.E. Lawrence: Ali, he didn't marry my mother.
- Sherif Ali: I see.
- T.E. Lawrence: I'm sorry.
- Sherif Ali: It seems to me that you are free to choose your own name, then.
- Auda abu Tayi: [as Lawrence sets out across the desert with Daoud and Faraj] You will cross Sinai?
- T.E. Lawrence: Moses did!
- Auda abu Tayi: And you will take the children?
- T.E. Lawrence: Moses did!
- Auda abu Tayi: Moses was a prophet and beloved of God!
- Sherif Ali: What is your name?
- T.E. Lawrence: My name is for my friends. None of my friends is a murderer!
- Tafas: [talking of Britain] Is that a desert country?
- T.E. Lawrence: No: a fat country. Fat people.
- Tafas: You are not fat?
- T.E. Lawrence: No. I'm different.
- Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown!
- T.E. Lawrence: Ah, well, we can't all be lion tamers.
- 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.
- T.E. Lawrence: We do not work this thing for Feisal.
- Auda abu Tayi: No? For the English, then?
- T.E. Lawrence: For the Arabs.
- Auda abu Tayi: The Arabs? The Howitat, Ajili, Rala, Beni Saha; these I know, I have even heard of the Harif, but the Arabs? What tribe is that?
- General Allenby: I thought I was a hard man, sir.
- Prince Feisal: You are merely a general. I must be a king.
- Jackson Bentley: Never saw a man killed with a sword before.
- T.E. Lawrence: [contemptuously] Why don't you take a picture?
- Jackson Bentley: Wish I had.
- T.E. Lawrence: My lord, I think... I think your book is right. 'The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped' and on this ocean the Bedu go where they please and strike where they please. This is the way the Bedu have always fought. You're famed throughout the world for fighting in this way and this is the way you should fight now!
- Bartender: [Lawrence enters the British officers' club with a Bedouin companion after capturing Aqaba, both men utterly exhausted and disheveled, and wearing Arab clothing] This is a bar for British officers!
- T.E. Lawrence: That's all right. We're not particular.
- General Allenby: [leafing through Lawrence's dossier] Undisciplined... unpunctual... untidy. Several languages. Knowledge of music... literature... knowledge of... knowledge of... you're an interesting man there's no doubt about it.
- Jackson Bentley: [on his interest in Lawrence and the Arab Revolt] I'm looking for a hero.
- Prince Feisal: Indeed? You do not seem a romantic man.
- Jackson Bentley: Oh, no! But certain influential men back home believe that the time has come for America to lend her weight to the patriotic struggle against Germany... and Turkey. Now, I've been sent to find material which will show our people that this war is...
- Prince Feisal: Enjoyable?
- Jackson Bentley: Oh, hardly THAT, sir. But to show it in its more... adventurous aspects.
- Prince Feisal: You are looking for a figure who will draw your country towards war?
- Jackson Bentley: All right, yes.
- Prince Feisal: Aurens is your man.
- T.E. Lawrence: Michael George Hartley, this is a nasty, dark little room.
- Hartley: That's right.
- T.E. Lawrence: We are not happy in it.
- Hartley: It's better than a nasty, dark little trench.
- T.E. Lawrence: Then you're an ignoble fellow.
- Hartley: That's right.
- Auda abu Tayi: When Lawrence finds what he's looking for, he will go home. When you find what you are looking for, you will go home.
- Colonel Brighton: I will not.
- Auda abu Tayi: Then you are a fool. Be thankful that when God made you a fool, He gave you a fool's face.
- Auda abu Tayi: What ails the Englishman?
- Sherif Ali: The one he killed is the one he brought out of the Nefud.
- Auda abu Tayi: It was written then. Better to have left him there.
- Prince Feisal: Well, General, I will leave you. Major Lawrence doubtless has reports to make upon my people and their weakness, and the need to keep them weak in the British interest... and the French interest too, of course. We must not forget the French now...
- General Allenby: [indignantly] I've told you, sir, no such treaty exists.
- Prince Feisal: Yes, General, you have lied most bravely, but not convincingly. I know this treaty does exist.
- T.E. Lawrence: Treaty, sir?
- Prince Feisal: He does it better than you, General. But then, of course, he is almost an Arab.
- Mr. Dryden: [to Bentley, on a meeting between Lawrence and Allenby] Well, I'll tell you. It's a little clash of temperament that's going on in there. Inevitably, one of them's half-mad - and the other, wholly unscrupulous.
- Prince Feisal: The English have a great hunger for desolate places. I fear they hunger for Arabia.
- T.E. Lawrence: Then you must deny it to them.
- Prince Feisal: You are an Englishman. Are you not loyal to England?
- T.E. Lawrence: To England and to other things.
- Prince Feisal: To England and Arabia both? And is that possible? I think you are another of these desert-loving English.
- General Murray: [on the Arab Revolt] It's a storm in a tea cup, Mr. Dryden - a sideshow. If you want my own opinion, this whole theater of operations is a sideshow! The real war's not being fought against the Turks, but the Germans. And not here, but on the Western front in the trenches! Your Bedouin Army - or whatever it calls itself - would be a sideshow OF a sideshow!
- Mr. Dryden: Big things have small beginnings, sir.
- General Murray: Does the Arab Bureau want a "big thing" in Arabia? If we get them to rise against the Turks, does the Bureau think they'll sit down quietly under us when this war's over?
- Mr. Dryden: The Arab Bureau thinks the job of the moment, sir, is to win the war.
- General Murray: Don't tell me my duty, Mr. Dryden!
- 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.
- T.E. Lawrence: Where are they now?
- Mr. Dryden: Anywhere within 300 miles of Medina. They're Hashemite Bedouins. They can cross 60 miles of desert in a day.
- T.E. Lawrence: Oh,thanks Dryden. This is going to be fun.
- Mr. Dryden: Lawrence, only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert: Beduins 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 recognised that you have a funny sense of fun.
- Prince Feisal: My friend Lawrence, if I may call him that. "My friend Lawrence". How many men will claim the right to use that phrase? How proudly! He longs for the greenness of his native land. He pines for the Gothic cottages of Surrey, is it not? Already in imagination, he catches trout and engages in all the activities of the English gentleman.
- General Allenby: That's me you're describing, sir, not Colonel Lawrence.
- T.E. Lawrence: The Law says the man must die... If he dies, would that content the Howitat?
- Auda abu Tayi: Yes.
- T.E. Lawrence: Sherif Ali. If none of lord Auda's men harms any of yours, will that content the Harith?
- Sherif Ali: Yes.
- T.E. Lawrence: Then I will execute the Law. I have no tribe and no one is offended.
- General Allenby: I've got orders to obey, thank God. Not like that poor devil. He's riding the whirlwind.
- Mr. Dryden: Let's hope we're not.
- General Allenby: I believe your name will be a household word when you'll have to go to the War Museum to find who Allenby was. You're the most extraordinary man I've ever met!
- T.E. Lawrence: Leave me alone!
- General Allenby: What?
- T.E. Lawrence: Leave me alone!
- General Allenby: Well, that's a feeble thing to say.
- T.E. Lawrence: I know I'm not ordinary.
- General Allenby: That's not what I'm saying...
- T.E. Lawrence: All right! I'm extraordinary! What of it?
- Tafas: Here you may drink...
- [Lawrence nods and takes out his canteen to drink water]
- Tafas: One cup.
- [pointing the tincup]
- T.E. Lawrence: [Lawrence pours in some water] You do not drink?
- Tafas: No.
- [Tafas shakes his head like saying no]
- T.E. Lawrence: I'll drink when you do.
- Tafas: I am *Bedu*.
- [Lawrence pours back the water in the tincup to canteen]
- Prince Feisal: But you know, Lieutenant, in the Arab city of Cordoba were two miles of public lighting in the streets when London was a village?
- T.E. Lawrence: Yes, you were great.
- Prince Feisal: Nine centuries ago.
- T.E. Lawrence: Time to be great again, my lord.