ALGERNON. Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
ALGERNON. Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right. JACK. Oh, that is nonsense! ALGERNON. It isn’t. It is a great truth. It accounts for the extraordinary number of bachelors that one sees all over the place.
ALGERNON. Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.
JACK. Well, my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country, and the cigarette case was given to me in the country.
JACK. For heaven’s sake, don’t try to be cynical. It’s perfectly easy to be cynical. ALGERNON. My dear fellow, it isn’t easy to be anything nowadays. There’s such a lot of beastly competition about.
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