Khartoum (1966) - Quotes

Taglines: Khartoum -- where the Nile divides, the great Cinerama adventure begins!

Taglines: They say the Nile still runs red from the Battle of Khartoum!

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: The Mahdi plans to lay siege to Khartoum. Take it by force. To slaughter all the Egyptians - and those Sudanese who haven't accepted him.

Col. J.D.H. Stewart: [incredulous] But... there are 35,000 people in Khartoum.

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: Those are his purposes. And I believe him. The man is sincere. He believes utterly in the Divine necessity for what he's doing. How could I have been such a stumbling fool! I'm a man who will question anything, except my own religious convictions. The Mahdi's no different. There's vanity for you! I seem to have suffered from the illusion that I have a monopoly on God.

Zobeir Pasha: [disbelieving; angry] The General will defend me. The great Christian hero will defend Zobeir the slaver. Before I receive my country from your bloody hands, I shall see it die. You killed my son!

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: I executed him.

Zobeir Pasha: Do you have sons, Gordon Pasha? Do you have sons? No! You killed mine!

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: God forgive me, Zobeir, but let the dead bury their dead.

Zobeir Pasha: You killed my flesh, my blood, my Suleiman! Get thee from my house and may ye die in the desert untended! May vultures consume thy flesh, sands thy blood!

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: Colonel, what are the chances of my sacking you as my aide?

Col. J.D.H. Stewart: If any exist, General, please be assured that I'd be the first to point them out to you.

Col. J.D.H. Stewart: Why did you let them talk you into this mission?

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: As is well known, I, ah..regard myself as a religious man, yet I belong to no church. I'm an able soldier, yet I abhor armies. I can even add that I've been introduced to hundreds of women, but never married. in other words, no one's ever talked me into anything.

Narrator: ...but there is this: A world with no room for the Gordons, is a world that will return to the sands.

William Ewart Gladstone: God go with you. And I don't envy God.

William Ewart Gladstone: I don't trust any man who consults God before he consults me.

Muhammad Ahmed: [in horror at seeing Gordon's decapitated head on the end of a pole] Take it away! Where is Abdullah? I forbade it, I forbade it!

Muhammad Ahmed: [removes a head from a large pot; removes another head from a second pot; places a severed arm and hand in Gordon's hands; Gordon stares horrified] Is it the Englishman whose name was Frank Power? Is it the Frenchman whose name was Herbin? Is it not your own ring?

Muhammad Ahmed: It is sometimes wise, Gordon Pasha, to provide the man with a few sunny hours of fraudulent hope so that when night comes he will have a more perfect inward vision of the truth of his hopelessness.

Muhammad Ahmed: I should prefer, Gordon Pasha, that you leave Khartoum now. You are not my enemy. Why should your blood sweeten the Nile?

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: And when the Mahdi floats me down the Nile, the government will assume a pained expression and will say to her majesty and the churchmen and the anti-slavery people well, we sent Gordon; we did the best we could'.

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: Every man has a final weapon: his own life. If he's afraid to lose it, he throws the weapon away.

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: [patting his camel in goodbye] So we ride beneath no more desert stars, then. Ah, all things must end.

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: If my life has a single point, it's this: I've learned to be unafraid of death but never to be unafraid of failure.

Gen. Charles Chinese Gordon: If you, as a servant of your god, must use one hundred thousand warriors to destroy me, a solitary servant of my God, then you whisper to me Muhammed Ahmed: who will be remembered from Khartoum, your god or mine?