Jeremy Northam credited as playing...
Sir Robert
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Do you know, Arthur, I sometimes wish I were you.
- Lord Arthur Goring: Do you know, Robert, sometimes I wish you were too. Except that you would probably make something useful out of my life, and that would never do.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Anyway, what's that saying about the sea and there being plenty of fish in it?
- Lord Arthur Goring: Ah, yes, but I couldn't possibly marry a fish. I'd be sure to land an old trout.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: I will give you any sum of money you want.
- Laura: Even you are not rich enough to buy back your past. No man is.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: If you are suggesting, Sir Edward, that my position in society owes anything to my wife, you are utterly mistaken. It owes everything to my wife.
- Laura: I want to talk to you about a great political and financial scheme, about this Argentine Canal Company, in fact.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: What a tedious, practical subject for you to talk about Mrs. Cheveley!
- Laura: Oh, I like tedious, practical subjects. What I don't like are tedious, practical people.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: You could always get married.
- Lord Arthur Goring: It's the "always" bit that alarms me.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Is it fair that some act of youthful folly should be brought up against me now - all these years later? Is it fair?
- Lord Arthur Goring: Robert, life is never fair! Perhaps it's a good thing for most of us that it is not.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: My God! What brought you into my life?
- Laura: Circumstances. At some point, we all have to pay for what we do. You have to pay now.
- Sir Robert: One mustn't believe everything one reads in the newspapers.
- Gertrude: Yes, in the old days we had the rack. Nowadays we have the press. Your own newspaper being the notable exception, Sir Edward. Where truth shines out like a beacon and lies run vainly for the shadows.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Did you know the Baron well?
- Laura: Intimately. Did you?
- Sir Robert Chiltern: At one time.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: This Argentine scheme is a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle.
- Laura: It is a speculation. A brilliant, daring speculation.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Believe me, Mrs Cheveley, it is a swindle. Let us call things by their proper names. It makes matters simpler.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: It is infamous, what you propose. Infamous!
- Laura: Oh, no. It is the game of life, Sir Robert, as we all have to play it - sooner or later.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: I wonder what kind of a woman she is.
- Lord Arthur Goring: Who?
- Sir Robert Chiltern: That woman - Mrs Cheveley.
- Lord Arthur Goring: Smallish.
- Gertrude: Robert, you are telling me the whole truth?
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Why do you ask me such a question?
- Gertrude: Why do you not answer it?
- Lord Arthur Goring: By the way, have you been talking to my father?
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Why? Should I?
- Lord Arthur Goring: Certainly not. He was foolish enough to suggest that I model myself on you.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: I have always said he was a man of exquisite taste and rare judgment.
- Lord Arthur Goring: My dear Robert, secrets from other people's wives are a necessary luxury in modern life. But no man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: If I were to tell her, Arthur, I would lose the love of the one woman in the world I worship. I couldn't tell her.
- Gertrude: I'm sorry, Mabel, I'm not in the mood for modern art. You don't mind, do you, if Arthur escorts you in my place?
- Mabel: As long as he promises not to be too serious. For I have observed a worrying trend.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: I swear on my life to be utterly trivial and never to keep my word.
- Mabel: In which case I shall be delighted.
- Lord Arthur Goring: Surely there must be some sin in her past life, any sin, weakness, perhaps, that might, well, help her to understand yours.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: No, I don't believe Gertrude knows what weakness or temptation is.
- Sir Robert Chiltern: Let women make no more ideals of men or they may ruin other lives as completely as you, you whom I have loved so wildly, have surely ruined mine.