Status Updates From Семь столпов мудрости

My shirking the duty would be understood, because I was a foreigner: but…I did not dare…while I yet presumed to help these Arabs in their own revolt. It was hard, anyway, for a stranger to influence another people's national movement, and doubly hard for a Christian and a sedentary person to sway Moslem nomads. I should make it impossible for myself if I claimed, simultaneously, the privileges of both societies.

The Bedouin “…would follow us, if we endured with them; and played the game according to their rules. The pity was, that we…broke down with exasperation and threw them over, blaming them for what was a fault in our own selves. Such strictures like a general's complaint of bad troops, were in reality a confession of our faulty foresight…”

Time slowly depressed my first, favourable, opinion of Abdulla's character. His constant ailments, which once aroused compassion, became fitter for contempt when their causes were apparent in laziness and self-indulgence. His casual attractive fits of arbitrariness now seemed feeble tyranny disguised as whims; his friendliness became caprice. The leaven of insincerity worked through all the fibres of his being.