Bernard [jeering]: Parameters! You can't stick Byron's head in your laptop. Genius isn't like your average grouse.
Valentine[casually]: Well, it's all trivial anyway
Bernard: What is?
Valentine: Who wrote what when…
Bernard: Trivial?
Valentine: Personalities.
Bernard: I'm sorry ~ did you say trivial?
Valentine: It's a technical term
Bernard: Not from where I'm from, it isn't.
Valentine: The questions you're asking don't matter, you see. It's like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn't matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge.
Bernard: Really? Why?
Valentine: Why what?
Bernard: Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities?
Valentine: Is he serious?
Hannah: No, he's trivial. Bernard--
Valentine[interrupting, to Bernard]: Do yourself a favour, you're on a loser
Bernard: Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres glued to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars ~ big bangs, black holes ~ who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?
Chloe: Are you against penicillin, Bernard?
Bernard: Don't feed the animals. [back to Valentine] I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except for the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had the chance to think it through
Hannah [loudly]: What the hell do you mean, the dust-jacket?
Bernard [ignoring her]: If knowledge isn't self-knowledge, it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes'. There you are, he wrote it after coming home from a party. [with offensive politeness] What is it that you're doing with grouse, Valentine, I'd love to know?
[Valentine stands up and it is suddenly apparent that he is shaking and close to tears]
Valentine[to Chloe]: He's not against penicillin and he knows I'm not against poetry. [to Bernard] I've given up on the grouse.
Hannah: You haven't, Valentine!
Valentine[leaving]: I can't do it
Hannah: Why?
Valentine: Too much noise. There's just  too much bloody noise!
[On which, Valentine leaves the room. Chloe, upset and in tears, jumps up and briefly pummels Bernard ineffectually with her fists]
Chloe: You bastard, Bernard!
[She follows Valentine out and is followed at a run by Gus. Pause.]
Hannah: Well, I think that's everybody. You can leave now. Give Lightning [the tortoise] a kick on your way out.
Bernard: Yes, I'm sorry about that. It's no fun when it's not among pros, is it?