Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East QUOTES

1 " mold—William Henry Yale also subscribed to Roosevelt’s notions of the ideal American man and of the dangers of “over-civilization,” code for effeminacy. The true man, in this worldview, was a rugged individualist, physically fit as well as intellectually cultured, as equally at home leading men into battle or shooting big game on the prairie as chatting with the ladies in the salon. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

2 " On top of this was the official indigenous Egyptian government that, though it was quite toothless, various British officials periodically felt the need to pretend to consult in order to maintain the appearance that the wishes of the actual inhabitants of Egypt somehow mattered. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

3 " By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

4 " had worked so hard to bring about, that Lawrence was suddenly "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

5 " And for all concerned there was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of “free trade,” the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

6 " this must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy’s life-line and of protecting our own.” By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially “accessories to the crime,” that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been given no alternative but to await another assault on the Suez Canal, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line—the narrow front of southern Palestine—an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

7 " The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

8 " the British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment—whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three—to the world’s less fortunate cultures and races. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

9 " The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

10 " considerably when Lord Kitchener assumed that post in 1911. Quickly coming to regard Storrs as his most trusted lieutenant—the Oriental secretary had been instrumental in torpedoing Curt Prüfer’s appointment to the khedival library directorship, for example—Kitchener had maintained their relationship even after his appointment to war secretary in August 1914. Since he fully intended to return to his Egyptian post once the war was over, Kitchener had left his protégé behind in Cairo to serve as his eyes and ears. But there was rather more to it than that. In Kitchener’s service, Ronald Storrs was the crucial conduit in a game of political intrigue so sensitive it was known to only a handful of men in Cairo, London, and Mecca, the possessor of perhaps the most dangerous secret in the Middle East. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

11 " nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

12 " correspondent in the Middle East, attaché William Yale. With that dispatch he was establishing a tradition of fundamentally misreading the situation in the Middle East that his successors in the American intelligence community would rigorously maintain for the next ninety-five years. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

13 " LATE ONE NIGHT in early October 1913, William Yale lay in his tent in the mountains of Anatolia, struck by a sense of wonder at how quickly a life could change. Just three weeks earlier he had been living in "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

14 " [A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades--no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

15 " frontier "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

16 " Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government’s secret policy in the Middle East—that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away—were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

17 " Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is. T. E. LAWRENCE, ADVICE TO BRITISH OFFICERS, IN TWENTY-SEVEN ARTICLES, AUGUST 1917 "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

18 " Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

19 " Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend’s army go in return for one million English pounds’ worth of gold. If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he’d very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

20 " As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was “the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements … a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East