- Howard Carruthers: Your government, and it IS your government, takes a paternal interest in the welfare of all large taxpayers!
- Elia Everett: You dimwit, the doorbell is ringing. The doorbell is ringing! You... you turned off your hearing aid on me! You did it again!
- [Throws her drink in his face]
- Elia Everett: You turned your hearing aid off on me! The kind of guy that turns his hearing aid off on his own wife! You stupid... Oh, Mr. Barton!
- Joan Salt: Well, you can't really be interested in somebody you've known since she was twelve.
- Cliff Barton: There's a few things about you, Joanie, that you didn't have when you were twelve.
- Mrs. George Salt: I married a man who I loved very deeply, and who I believe loved me. Now we are now just two old stone lions staring into eternity on the library steps. I have substituted charities for love, meetings for marriage. I have built great organizations on a sound foundation of utter loneliness.
- Cliff Barton: We used an unprincipled strategy to back up an unjustified demand. Because I objected, you are calling it disloyalty... ..
- George Salt: Duty is a pompous illusion implying choice when there is no choice. I am a creature of power. I pursue it totally and I obey it totally. You pursue it partially, and so you fail, and in failing you are a threat to me. Now either resign Cliff or I must destroy you.
- Miriam Linka: ...I love you, but it's wrong. What do you know of me? Where I came from? What I was in the war? In the concentration camp? In Vienna?
- Cliff Barton: I'm in love with a woman, not a history book.