George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

"If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses."

"HIGGINS. 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 were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another."

"I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."

"HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge..."

"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 to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton..."

"HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly. NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well."

"HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me."

"There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things." Henry Higgins, Act V, Pygmalion"

"MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future. HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of."

"The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out."

"What you are to do without me I cannot imagine."