Pygmalion Quotes

“Does it occur to you, that the girl has some feelings?”

“He’s no right to take away my character. My character is the same to me as any lady’s.”

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.”

“A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.”

“You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.”

“I’d like to kill you, you selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of—in the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me back again there, do you?”

“Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?”

“Well, the matter is, sir, that you can’t take a girl up like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach.”

“I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood.”

“I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything.”

“You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll”

“I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn.”

“She had become attached to you both. She worked very hard for you, Henry! I don’t think you quite realize what anything in the nature of brain work means to a girl like that. Well, it seems that when the great day of trial came, and she did this wonderful thing for you without making a single mistake, you two sat there and never said a word to her, but talked together of how glad you were that it was all over and how you had been bored with the whole thing. And then you were surprised because she threw your slippers at you!”

“The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”

“All I ask is my rights as a father; and you’re the last man alive to expect me to let her go for nothing; for I can see you’re one of the straight sort, Governor. Well, what’s a five pound note to you? And what’s Eliza to me?”

“The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”

″“What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything...” “I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving.”

“I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you.”

“It was a silly notion: the whole thing has been a bore.”

“You have caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly ever happened to me before.”