- Bessie Green: [answering a call] I thought you were dead and buried. Well sure I missed you, like Booth missed Lincoln. What do you think I've been doing, sitting around the house embroidering doilies?
- [repeated line]
- Bessie Green: [at rapid-fire delivery as she operates the switchboard] Simon and Tedesco... Who's calling, please... One moment please...
- George Simon: It's a fine thing for me isn't it to have a brother who gets pinched in gambling raids, annoying women on the subways, passing out rubber checks.
- Henry Susskind: Say, kid, that's some run you've got in your stocking.
- Bessie Green: Where? Oh, gee, now wouldn't that give you a pain and I just put 'em on clean this morning.
- Henry Susskind: I'll buy you a new pair if you let me put 'em on for you.
- Bessie Green: Hey, listen, one more crack like that out of you and you'll get a good slap in the face!
- Henry Susskind: Get hot, get hot.
- Goldie Rindskopf: I'm going to lunch.
- Arthur Sandler: All right, beautiful, can you be reached at the automat?
- Goldie Rindskopf: You're very funny - I don't think.
- George Simon: Have a chocolate cream.
- Lillian La Rue: No, I'm on a diet; but, if you got a cigarette?
- George Simon: What's the idea of this anyway? I was engaged to defend you on the charge of murdering your husband, there's nothing in the retainer that requires me to make love to you.
- George Simon: He and the rest of those silk stocking babies on the Bar Association have been gunning for me for years. But, they haven't gotten anything on me yet and, no, they never will.
- Bessie Green: [on the phone] Huh? Ah, just a fresh mug in the office here, putting things down my back. Yeah, I know, they never can keep their hands to themselves.
- Herbert Weinberg: You might at least be civil to me. Everywhere else I go people treat me with civility.
- Rexy Gordon: I try to be civil to everybody, Mr. Weinberg; but, I can't sit here all day talking about nothings.
- Pete Malone: Those guys who came over on the Mayflower don't like to see the boys from Second Avenue sitting in the high places. They've had their knives out for me for a long time too.
- George Simon: Do you think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth? I began life in the same gutter that you did. Why you wouldn't have the guts to go through one tenth of what I went through to get where I am. You and your "cassocks" and your class wars. You think I don't know what it means to sweat and freeze and go hungry? Don't come around me with any of that half-baked Communistic bull and expect me to fall for it.
- Harry Becker: Shut up, Simon. How did you get where you are? I'll tell you. By betraying your own class, that's how. By climbing on the backs of the working class, that's how. Getting in right with bourgeois politicians and crooked corporations, that feed on the blood and the sweat of the workers.
- George Simon: That's enough.
- Harry Becker: No, it's not enough! I'm going to tell you what you're Counsellor of, Simon, sitting here in your Fifth Avenue office with a bootblack at your feet and a lot of white collar slaves running errands for you... A cheap prostitute, that's what you are. You and your cars and your country estate and your kept parasite of a wife!
- George Simon: Whenever you give anybody a helping hand, he always turns around and kicks you in the pants.