- Ann Dobbs: [shouting] How can you be so aggressive about your job and so gentle about me?
- [Sobs]
- Charles Dobbs: I've always thought that... being aggressive was the way to... keep my job and being gentle was the way to keep you.
- [Reflective pause]
- Charles Dobbs: Well, I've lost my job, haven't I?
- Charles Dobbs: [to Ann about her nymphomania] I've never held your appetites against you. The unaddicted shouldn't blame the addicted.
- Samuel Fennan: Practically everybody was a member of the party at Oxford in the 30s. Half the present cabinet were party men. You know Mr. Dobbs, when you're young, you hitch the wagon or whatever you believe in to whatever star looks likely it can get the wagon moving. When I was an undergraduate, the wagon was social justice, and the star was Karl Marx. We perambulated with banners. We fed hunger marchers. A few of us fought in Spain. Some of us even wrote poetry. I still believe it was a good wagon, but an impractical star. We had faith and hope and charity. A wrong faith, a false hope, but I still think the right sort of charity. Our eyes were dewy with it, dewy and half shut.
- Charles Dobbs: How long are you staying?
- Dieter Frey: A few days. Business lunches, business dinners... I even have a business breakfast. Who knows? I might actually do some business too.
- Bill Appleby: Are you suggesting that Elsa might have connived in her husband's murder? That's rather a ghoulish thought, Charley.
- Charles Dobbs: She's had a rather ghoulish life.
- Charles Dobbs: [to Elsa] What kind of daydreams did you dream, Mrs. Fennan, that had so little of the world in them?
- Charles Dobbs: [as Dobbs is leaving his home, sees his wife's car pull up] Hello, darling, I'm on my way out. Won't be back 'til late, don't wait up.
- Ann Dobbs: [Ann Dobbs stepping out of the car] That's all right, I'm tired anyway.
- Charles Dobbs: Who was it tonight ?
- Ann Dobbs: [freezes and doesn't answer]
- Charles Dobbs: Ah, someone I know... go back to bed, darling.