- Suzanne Renaud: Now do you want to kiss me?
- Fred Martingale: N - no, I think not. You'd better keep your kisses for emergencies.
- Toady: Consider the diamond itself for instance. Carbon, soot, chemically speaking. And yet the hardest of all matters. So hard, in fact, that whatever it touches must suffer: glass, steel, the human soul.
- Mike Davis: Why don't you sell your rug someplace else?
- Toady: I am here, free as the wind, fountain of extraordinary knowledge, splendidly corrupt and eager to be of profitable service.
- Fred Martingale: I'm being constantly disillusioned. Has money completely lost its power? Is everyone motivated now by love?
- Suzanne Renaud: Believe me, he will tell me now.
- Fred Martingale: How do I know I can trust you? I can't compete with love.
- [He goes to his humidor for a cigar and seems to change his mind]
- Fred Martingale: Why will i never learn? The most dangerous thing about completely immoral women is their tremendous unused and unpredictable reserve of honest feeling.
- Mike Davis: [to Thompson about his war experience] I went to bed with a 75mm for three years, but now i sleep alone.
- Fred Martingale: [to Mike Davis] I never know what to think anymore. I'm being constantly disillusioned. Has money completely lost its power? Is everyone motivated now by love? The diamonds for the girl? Really, my dear Michael, she's not worth it.
- [first lines]
- Narrator: This part of the desert of South Africa, where only a parched camel thorn tree relieves the endless parallels of time, space, and sky, surrounds like a rope of sand the richest diamond-bearing area in the world -- an uneasy land where men inflamed by monotony and the heat sometimes forget the rules of civilization.
- Suzanne Renaud: Of course, if you're a man of principle...
- Fred Martingale: I take it you're quite experienced.
- Suzanne Renaud: The German is brittle. The Frenchman cries l'amour! The American is hoping for the cavalry to come.
- Fred Martingale: And what do Englishmen do?
- Suzanne Renaud: They pay.
- Fred Martingale: [Realizing Suzanne has trapped him in the badger game] I suppose this is what I deserve for forgetting my age... but I am unmarried.
- Dr. Francis Hunter: [In an alcoholic haze to Mike] You'll spoil the rhythm of Dr. Hunter's famous prescription for pickling the heart: one injection every 15 minutes.
- [He finishes a shot of whiskey, and the bartender pours him three more]
- Dr. Francis Hunter: The rhythm is very important.
- Commandant Paul Vogel: Are you bargaining with me... a pig?
- Suzanne Renaud: [Contemptuously] Yes, I am bargaining with you... pig to pig!
- [He slaps her several times]
- Mike Davis: [to Thompson about his war experience] I ent to bed with a 75mm for three years, but now i sleep alone.
- Commandant Paul Vogel: Consider this place for a minute if you will. It often reminds one of the interior of a whale's belly.
- Mike Davis: You sure get around.
- Fred Martingale: [realizing Suzanne has trapped him in the badger game] I suppose this is what I deserve for forgetting my age... but I am unmarried.
- Mike Davis: [Observing, in a bar, that Thompson is drinking a bit heavily] Take it easy, fella'. You got all night.
- Thompson: I go on duty in two hours.
- Mike Davis: Well, I wouldn't drink so much.
- Thompson: You ever spent eight hours in a half-track?
- Mike Davis: Not yet.
- Thompson: Then you've never had your eyes fall out or your throat close up or your guts turn inside out from gas fumes, sand, and heat.
- Mike Davis: It's your squirrel cage. Why'd you pick it?
- Thompson: I ran a tank during the war.
- Mike Davis: I went to bed with a 75 millimeter for three years, but now I sleep alone.
- Thompson: Know of a job that pays better?
- Fred Martingale: [of Vogel] You know, in his way, he was quite a remarkable fellow - nasty, but remarkable.