This Happy Breed (1944)

Eileen Erskine: Vi

Photos 

Quotes 

• Vi : You can't expect everybody in the world to feel just the same as you do, you know?

• Sam Leadbitter : Don't be silly, I can afford it.

  Vi : Capitalist!

• Sam Leadbitter : But as you well know there are millions and millions of 'omes in this country today where Christmas is naught but a mockery, where there's neither warmth nor food nor even the bare necessities of life, where little children, old before their time, huddle round a fireless grate.

  Queenie : Well, they'd be just as well off if they stayed in the middle of the room then, wouldn't they?

  Reg : Oh shut up Queenie, Sam's quite right.

  Sam Leadbitter : That sort of remark, Queenie, springs from complacency, arrogance and a full stomach.

  Queenie : You leave my stomach out of it.

  Sam Leadbitter : It is people like you, apathetic, unthinking, docile supporters of a capitalistic system which is a disgrace to civilization who are responsible for at least three quarters of the cruelest sufferings of the world. As long as you can earn your miserable little salaries and go to the pictures and enjoy yourselves, the rest of society can go hang, can't it. You're too busy getting all weepy over Rudolph Valentino to spare any tears for the workers of the world!

  Vi : Don't get excited, Sam. Queenie didn't mean it.

  Sam Leadbitter : I am not excited, and Queenie doesn't mean anything to me anyway.

  Queenie : Oh, pardon me all while I go and commit suicide.

• Vi : Now listen, Sam Leadbitter. Reg thinks you're wonderful. He's younger than you and easily led. You've been filling him up with your rotten ideas till he can't see straight. There may be a lot of things wrong, but it's not a noisy great gasbag like you that's going to set them right. And the next time you come here on a Sunday evening and start pawing me about and saying love's the most glorious thing in the world for rich and poor alike you're going to get such a smack in the face you'll wish you'd never been born.

• Mrs. Flint : I'm sure I hope nothing dreadful's happened to them.

  Vi : Oh, Granny, what could have?

  Mrs. Flint : Accidents will happen.

  Aunt Sylvia : Some people seem to think of nothing but horrors. Morbid, that's what it is.

  Mrs. Flint : I'll thank you not to call me names, Sylvia Gibbons.