Social class

• Mrs Birling - "You'd think everybody has to look after everybody else; community and all that nonsense"
• Mrs Birling - "Girls of that class"
• Mr Birling - “We were paying the usual rates and if they didn’t like those rates, they could go and work somewhere else”
• Sheila - “But these girls aren’t cheap labour – they’re people”
• Mrs Birling - “a girl of that sort would ever refuse money”
• Sheila - "I’d persuade mother to close our account with them"
• Gerald - ‘We’re respectable citizens and not criminals’
• Stage directions - "pleased with themselves"
• Mr Birling - "We were having a nice little family celebration tonight. And a nasty mess you've made of it now, haven't you?"
• Inspector - "A nice little promising life there, I thought, and a nasty mess somebody's made of it"
• Mr Birling - "I was an alderman for years - and Lord Mayor two years ago - and I'm still on the Bench"
• Inspector - "Public men have responsibilities as well as privileges"
• Mr Birling - "If you don't come down sharply on some of these people, they'd soon be asking for the earth"
• Mrs Birling - "I think it was simply a piece of gross impertinence - quite deliberate - and naturally that was one of the things that prejudiced me against her case"
• Mrs Birling - "claiming elaborate fine feelings and scruples that were simply absurd in a girl in her position"
• Inspector -"her position now is that she lies with a burnt-out inside on a slab"
• Sheila - "I can't help thinking about this girl -destroying herself so horribly - and I've been so happy tonight. Oh I wish you hadn't told me"
• Gerald - "We're respectable citizens and not criminals"
• Gerald - "There isn't much difference as you think,..., I wouldn't know where to draw the line"
• Sheila - "You mustn't try to build up a kind of wall between us and that girl"
• Inspector - "You slammed the door in her face"
• Mrs Birling - "We really must stop these silly pretences"