Bernard Shaw

“ HECTOR. Are Mangan's bristles worse than Randall's lovelocks?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER,. We must win powers of life and death over them both. I refuse to die until I have invented the means.
HECTOR. Who are we that we should judge them?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What are they that they should judge us? Yet they do, unhesitatingly. There is enmity between our seed and their seed. They know it and act on it, strangling our souls. They believe in themselves. When we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them. ”

“ What is your objection to poor Mangan, Mrs Hushabye? He looks all right to me. But then I am so accustomed to him.
MRS HUSHABYE. Have you no heart? Have you no sense? Look at the brute! Think of poor weak innocent Ellie in the clutches of this slavedriver, who spends his life making thousands of rough violent workmen bend to his will and sweat for him: a man accustomed to have great masses of iron beaten into shape for him by steam-hammers! to fight with women and girls over a halfpenny an hour ruthlessly! a captain of industry, I think you call him, don't you? ”

“ War cannot bear the terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of laughter that glares on the stage. When men are heroically dying for their country, it is not the time to show their lovers and wives and fathers and mothers how they are being sacrificed to the blunders of boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the electioneering of demagogues, the Pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and lies and rancors and bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their prison doors, and sets them in the thrones of power and popularity. ”

“ I see you, the younger generation, turning from their romance and sentiment and snobbery to money and comfort and hard common sense. I was ten times happier on the bridge in the typhoon, or frozen into Arctic ice for months in darkness, than you or they have ever been. You are looking for a rich husband. At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life ”

“ HECTOR. You are no Bohemian; but you are no Puritan either: your attraction is alive and powerful. What sort of woman do you count yourself?
LADY UTTERWORD. I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like. An ill-conducted, careless woman gets simply no chance. An ill-conducted, careless man is never allowed within arm's length of any woman worth knowing.
HECTOR. I see. You are neither a Bohemian woman nor a Puritan woman. ”

“ MAZZINI. Ellie, dear, there is no disgrace in going to the cellar. An officer would order his soldiers to take cover. Mr Hushabye is behaving like an amateur. Mangan and the burglar are acting very sensibly; and it is they who will survive.
ELLIE. Let them. I shall behave like an amateur. But why should you run any risk?
MAZZINI. Think of the risk those poor fellows up there are running!
NURSE GUINNESS. Think of them, indeed, the murdering blackguards! What next?
A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats, or clutch the nearest support. ”

“ MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.
MAZZINI. Very true, no doubt, at sea. But in politics, I assure you, they only run into jellyfish. Nothing happens.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. At sea nothing happens to the sea. Nothing happens to the sky. The sun comes up from the east and goes down to the west. The moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and comes later and later until she is lost in the light as other things are lost in the darkness. ”

“ MRS HUSHABYE. Desdemona would have found him out if she had lived, you know. I wonder was that why he strangled her!
ELLIE. Othello was not telling lies.
MRS HUSHABYE. How do you know?
ELLIE. Shakespeare would have said if he was. Hesione, there are men who have done wonderful things: men like Othello, only, of course, white, and very handsome, and—
MRS HUSHABYE. Ah! Now we're coming to it. Tell me all about him. I knew there must be somebody, or you'd never have been so miserable about Mangan: you'd have thought it quite a lark to marry him. ”

“ MANGAN. No such nonsense. As a practical business man. [They all burst out laughing] . What are you all laughing at?
MRS HUSHARYE. Oh, Alfred, Alfred!
ELLIE. You! who have to get my father to do everything for you!
MRS HUSHABYE. You! who are afraid of your own workmen!
HECTOR. You! with whom three women have been playing cat and mouse all the evening!
LADY UTTERWORD. You must have given an immense sum to the party funds, Mr Mangan.
MANGAN. Not a penny out of my own pocket. The syndicate found the money: they knew how useful I should be to them in the Government. ”

“ CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.
ELLIE [wearily, leaving him and beginning to wander restlessly about the room] . I'm sorry, Captain Shotover; but it's no use talking like that to me. Old-fashioned people are no use to me. ”

“ You will never be free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water. Go get me another: Guinness knows where it is. You had better see for yourself the horror of an old man drinking.
ELLIE. You shall not drink. Dream. I like you to dream. You must never be in the real world when we talk together.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I am too weary to resist, or too weak. ”

“ CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What more have any of us but travelling expenses for our life's journey?
MRS HUSHABYE. But you have factories and capital and things?
MANGAN. People think I have. People think I'm an industrial Napoleon. That's why Miss Ellie wants to marry me. But I tell you I have nothing.
ELLIE. Do you mean that the factories are like Marcus's tigers? That they don't exist?
MANGAN. They exist all right enough. But they're not mine. They belong to syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy good-for-nothing capitalists. I get money from such people to start the factories. ”

“ The war did not change men's minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors. ”

“ Am I a child or a grown man? I won't stand this mothering tyranny. I'll go back to the city, where I'm respected and made much of.
MRS HUSHABYE. Goodbye, Alf. Think of us sometimes in the city. Think of Ellie's youth!
ELLIE. Think of Hesione's eyes and hair!
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Think of this garden in which you are not a dog barking to keep the truth out!
HECTOR. Think of Lady Utterword's beauty! her good sense! her style!
LADY UTTERWORD. Flatterer. Think, Mr. Mangan, whether you can really do any better for yourself elsewhere: that is the essential point, isn't it? ”

“ MAZZINI. I hope poor Mangan is safe.
MRS HUSHABYE. He is hiding in the cave in the gravel pit.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. My dynamite drew him there. It is the hand of God.
HECTOR [returning from the house and striding across to his former place] . There is not half light enough. We should be blazing to the skies.
ELLIE [tense with excitement] . Set fire to the house, Marcus.
MRS HUSHABYE. My house! No.
HECTOR. I thought of that; but it would not be ready in time.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The judgment has come. Courage will not save you; but it will show that your souls are still live. ”

“ MANGAN. Well, you have a nerve.
MRS HUSHABYE. And you have a heart, Alfy, a whimpering little heart, but a real one. [Releasing him suddenly] . Now run and make it up with Ellie. She has had time to think what to say to you, which is more than I had [she goes out quickly into the garden by the port door] .
MANGAN. That woman has a pair of hands that go right through you.
ELLIE. Still in love with her, in spite of all we said about you?
MANGAN. Are all women like you two? Do they never think of anything about a man except what they can get out of him? ”

“ Well, don't waste your jealousy on my moustache. Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary hero that supplants us all in the long run. Besides, jealousy does not belong to your easy man-of-the-world pose, which you carry so well in other respects.
RANDALL. Really, Hushabye, I think a man may be allowed to be a gentleman without being accused of posing.
HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under your pose is apparently Ellie's favorite, Othello. ”

“ To pass from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. ”

“ Emerging from the hollow is the cupola of an observatory. Between the observatory and the house is a flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a long garden seat on the west.
A young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting in the window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look out at the view. One hand props her chin: the other hangs down with a volume of the Temple Shakespeare in it, and her finger stuck in the page she has been reading. ”

“ I tricked these thieves into believing I'd sold myself to the devil. It saved my soul from the kicking and swearing that was damning me by inches.
ELLIE [releasing him] . I shall pretend to sell myself to Boss Mangan to save my soul from the poverty that is damning me by inches.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Riches will damn you ten times deeper. Riches won't save even your body.
ELLIE. Old-fashioned again. We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies. ”

“ It isn't my fault if I'm old and haven't a moustache like a bronze candlestick as your husband has. There are things no decent woman would do to a man—like a man hitting a woman in the breast.
Hesione, utterly shamed, sits down on the sofa and covers her face with her hands. Mangan sits down also on his chair and begins to cry like a child. Ellie stares at them. Mrs Hushabye, at the distressing sound he makes, takes down her hands and looks at him. She rises and runs to him. ”

“ MAZZINI. It won't end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn't end: it goes on.
ELLIE. Oh, it can't go on forever. I'm always expecting something. I don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
LADY UTTERWORD. The point for a young woman of your age is a baby.
HECTOR. Yes, but, damn it, I have the same feeling; and I can't have a baby.
LADY UTTERWORD. By deputy, Hector.
HECTOR. But I have children. All that is over and done with for me: and yet I too feel that this can't last. We sit here talking, and leave everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil. ”

“ CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It had better be lost. Any fool can govern with a stick in his hand. I could govern that way. It is not God's way. The man is a numskull.
LADY UTTERWORD. The man is worth all of you rolled into one. What do you say, Miss Dunn?
ELLIE. I think my father would do very well if people did not put upon him and cheat him and despise him because he is so good.
MANGAN [contemptuously] . I think I see Mazzini Dunn getting into parliament or pushing his way into the Government. We've not come to that yet, thank God! What do you say, Mrs Hushabye? ”

“ To me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted personally with the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even found a grim satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. ”

“ England, inviolate for so many centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. ”

“ CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.
ELLIE. I never thought of that before.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. If you're marrying for business, you can't be too businesslike.
ELLIE. Why do women always want other women's husbands?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in to one that is wild? ”