An Ideal Husband Quotes

“Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues – and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins - one after the other.”

“Lady Chiltern is a woman of the very highest principles, I am glad to say. I am a little too old now, myself, to trouble about setting a good example, but I always admire people who do.”

“But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren’t they?”

“How you women war against each other!”

“Well, I delight in your bad qualities. I wouldn’t have you part with one of them.”

“I would to God that I had been able to tell the truth . . . to live the truth. Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.”

“Ah, I forgot, your husband is an exception. Mine is the general rule, and nothing ages a woman so rapidly as having married the general rule.”

“All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.”

“Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.”

“Oh, damn sympathy. There is a great deal too much of that sort of thing going on nowadays.”

“Circumstances should never alter principles!”

“My dear father, only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.”

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

“Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable.”

“We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason.”

“I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.”

“It is the growth of the moral sense in women that makes marriage such a hopeless, one-sided institution.”

“You can forget. Men easily forget. And I forgive. That is how women help the world. I see that now.”

“Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. […] Science can never grapple with the irrational.”

“She loves you, Robert. Why should she not forgive?”

“Politics are my only pleasure.”

“No one should be entirely judged by their past.”

“It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.”

“It is power to do good that is fine – that, and that only.”

“I delight in talking politics. I talk them all day long. But I can’t bear listening to them.”

“Besides, Gertrude, public and private life are different things. They have different laws, and move on different lines.”

“Sooner or later in political life one has to compromise. Every one does.”

“Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.”