Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
T. E. LawrenceRead
To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fighting against resistance or unrest can be chaotic and ineffective.
This quote by T. E. Lawrence illustrates the futility and difficulty of attempting to suppress rebellion through force. It likens the process to the absurdity of trying to eat soup with a knife, highlighting how poorly suited traditional methods of conflict resolution are for addressing complex social upheavals.
Themes
WarRebellionConflictFutilityResolution
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker discussing the challenges of modern warfare.
More from T. E. Lawrence
All quotes βAll the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
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In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade.... The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance.
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The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
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Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.
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We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.
T. E. LawrenceRead
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