An Ideal Husband (I) (1999)

Jeremy Northam: Sir Robert

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Quotes 

• Sir Robert Chiltern : I will give you any sum of money you want.

  Laura : Even you are not rich enough to buy back your past. No man is.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : Do you know, Arthur, I sometimes wish I were you.

  Lord Arthur Goring : Do you know, Robert, sometimes I wish you were too. Except that you would probably make something useful out of my life, and that would never do.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : If you are suggesting, Sir Edward, that my position in society owes anything to my wife, you are utterly mistaken. It owes everything to my wife.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : Anyway, what's that saying about the sea and there being plenty of fish in it?

  Lord Arthur Goring : Ah, yes, but I couldn't possibly marry a fish. I'd be sure to land an old trout.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : You could always get married.

  Lord Arthur Goring : It's the "always" bit that alarms me.

• Laura : I want to talk to you about a great political and financial scheme, about this Argentine Canal Company, in fact.

  Sir Robert Chiltern : What a tedious, practical subject for you to talk about Mrs. Cheveley!

  Laura : Oh, I like tedious, practical subjects. What I don't like are tedious, practical people.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : Is it fair that some act of youthful folly should be brought up against me now - all these years later? Is it fair?

  Lord Arthur Goring : Robert, life is never fair! Perhaps it's a good thing for most of us that it is not.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : My God! What brought you into my life?

  Laura : Circumstances. At some point, we all have to pay for what we do. You have to pay now.

• Sir Robert : One mustn't believe everything one reads in the newspapers.

  Gertrude : Yes, in the old days we had the rack. Nowadays we have the press. Your own newspaper being the notable exception, Sir Edward. Where truth shines out like a beacon and lies run vainly for the shadows.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : Did you know the Baron well?

  Laura : Intimately. Did you?

  Sir Robert Chiltern : At one time.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : This Argentine scheme is a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle.

  Laura : It is a speculation. A brilliant, daring speculation.

  Sir Robert Chiltern : Believe me, Mrs Cheveley, it is a swindle. Let us call things by their proper names. It makes matters simpler.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : Allow me to introduce my dearest friend, the idlest man in London.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : It is infamous, what you propose. Infamous!

  Laura : Oh, no. It is the game of life, Sir Robert, as we all have to play it - sooner or later.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : I wonder what kind of a woman she is.

  Lord Arthur Goring : Who?

  Sir Robert Chiltern : That woman - Mrs Cheveley.

  Lord Arthur Goring : Smallish.

• Gertrude : Robert, you are telling me the whole truth?

  Sir Robert Chiltern : Why do you ask me such a question?

  Gertrude : Why do you not answer it?

• Lord Arthur Goring : By the way, have you been talking to my father?

  Sir Robert Chiltern : Why? Should I?

  Lord Arthur Goring : Certainly not. He was foolish enough to suggest that I model myself on you.

  Sir Robert Chiltern : I have always said he was a man of exquisite taste and rare judgment.

• Lord Arthur Goring : My dear Robert, secrets from other people's wives are a necessary luxury in modern life. But no man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out.

  Sir Robert Chiltern : If I were to tell her, Arthur, I would lose the love of the one woman in the world I worship. I couldn't tell her.

• Gertrude : I'm sorry, Mabel, I'm not in the mood for modern art. You don't mind, do you, if Arthur escorts you in my place?

  Mabel : As long as he promises not to be too serious. For I have observed a worrying trend.

  Sir Robert Chiltern : I swear on my life to be utterly trivial and never to keep my word.

  Mabel : In which case I shall be delighted.

• Lord Arthur Goring : Surely there must be some sin in her past life, any sin, weakness, perhaps, that might, well, help her to understand yours.

  Sir Robert Chiltern : No, I don't believe Gertrude knows what weakness or temptation is.

• Sir Robert Chiltern : Let women make no more ideals of men or they may ruin other lives as completely as you, you whom I have loved so wildly, have surely ruined mine.