Oscar Wilde. A woman of no importance (№ 370198)

We want to build a life for better, cleaner and more equitable grounds than those on which it is built here. Without a doubt, all this sounds strange to you. And can not seem strange. You rich people in England do not understand how you live. How could you understand? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and clean. Living, as all of you, at the expense of others, exploiting people, you mock the sacrifice, and if they throw the poor a piece of bread, only for someone to manage them for a while. With all your pomp and wealth and art you can't live can't even do that. You love beauty, views of that you can touch and turn, that beauty that you can destroy and destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you have no idea. Your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It sees and hears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.