How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from Mary Poppins.
Quote #1
BERT: Let's sit down. You know, begging your pardon, but the one my heart goes out to is your father. There he is, in that cold heartless bank day after day, hammed in by mounds of cold heartless money. I don't like to see any living thing caged up.
Like Freddie Mercury said in "I Want to Break Free" Mr. Banks needs to…break free. But he doesn't know he's in a prison, because it's invisible—the prison of his career and his misguided values. Only when he's fired from the bank does he experience the thrill of freedom.
Quote #2
JANE: Father in a cage?
BERT: They makes cages of all sizes and shapes, you know. Bank-shaped, some of them, carpets and all.
The cage is obviously a metaphor. Mr. Banks isn't in a literal cage, eating food pellets and scurrying around on a metal mesh floor.
Quote #3
BERT: You've got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone... Though childhood slips like sand through a sieve... And all too soon they've up and grown, and then they've flown... And it's too late for you to give - just that spoonful of sugar to 'elp the medicine go down - medicine go dow-wown, medicine go down.
Bert warns George Banks against getting penned inside his own workaholic habits. He has to add that "spoonful of sugar" to life—i.e. show his natural fatherly warmth to his kids.
Quote #4
GEORGE: Remember that the bank is a quiet and decorous place, and we must be on our best behavior.
MICHAEL: But I thought it was your bank.
GEORGE: Yes, well, I'm one of the junior officers, so in a sense it is. Sort of.
George's jacked-up sense of purpose at the beginning of the movie gives way, at the end, to his sense that he's an insecure and minor official at the bank, worried about what kind of impression he's making on his superiors.
Quote #5
GEORGE: A man has dreams of walking with giants. To carve his niche in the edifice of time. Before the mortar of his seal has a chance to congeal... The cup is dashed from his lips! The flame is snuffed a-borning...he's brought to wrack and ruin in his prime.
George thinks he's being destroyed—but actually, he's escaping his cage and becoming a new man. He's being reborn as a cool dad who likes flying kites with his kids.