LEO MERCURÉ: The Daily Express says (the play)’s disgusting.

GILDA: We should be cut to the quick if it said anything else.

ERNEST FRIEDLANDER: Be quiet! Be quiet!

LEO MERCURÉ: Why should we be quiet? You’re making enough row to blast the roof off! Why should you have the monopoly of noise? Why should your pompous moral pretensions be allowed to hurdle across the city without any competition? We’ve all got lungs. Let’s use them! Let’s shriek like mad! Let’s enjoy ourselves!

It's a sad reflection on society how many people are shocked by honesty... and how few by dishonesty.

Time is the reef upon which all our mystic ships are wrecked.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

The human race is a letdown, Ernest — a bad, bad letdown. And I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed, but it hasn’t. It thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn’t. It’s wallowing in it. It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We’ve invented a few things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions.