Memorable quotes for
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

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Professor Bernard Quatermass: I never had a career. Only work.

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Sladden: Are you insured? I'm insured. It's good to be insured. At least it cheers you up.

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Minister of Defense: You realise what you're implying? That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects?

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Col. Breen: Mars is dead, nothing there but a few scraps of lichen.
Professor Bernard Quatermass: Five million years ago it may have been very different. Suppose at that time there were living beings on it with techniques that let them visit the Earth at a time when the most highly evolved creatures here, our own ancestors, were only a type of Pliocene ape.
Minister of Defense: Go on.
Professor Bernard Quatermass: They may have wanted to found another colony, when their own world was doomed, but couldn't endure our atmosphere, so they experimented.
Minister of Defense: Oh, and the insects were responsible?
Professor Bernard Quatermass: There is clearly some connection. My guess is that those were ape mutations being brought back for release on Earth.
Col. Breen: And you really believe this was possible? That apes were systematically taken from this planet to another and...
Professor Bernard Quatermass: Altered, by selective breeding, atomic surgery, methods we can't guess, and with new faculties instilled in them, high intelligence, perhaps something else.
Howell: In effect, a colonization.
Professor Bernard Quatermass: It would be a way of possessing the Earth. Only a colony by proxy, but better than leaving nothing at all behind.
Howell: Surely it had to be carried out on a hugh scale.
Professor Bernard Quatermass: Yes, if I'm right, if I'm right, we've come on a single instance, probably an accident, a landing that went wrong and they all died. The Thames valley was swamp then.
Minister of Defense: You realize what you are implying? That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects.
Professor Bernard Quatermass: I suppose I am.

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Professor Bernard Quatermass: The will to survive is an odd phenomenon. Roney, if we found out our own world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do about it?
Dr. Mathew Roney: Nothing, just go on squabbling like usual.
Professor Bernard Quatermass: Yes, but is we weren't men?

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Barbara Judd: We are the Martians now.

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Sladden: [Preparing his drill] I did steel armour plating within six inches thick. Swish - just like that. Oh, it was legal. A bloke got shut in a strong room. But I got him out. It was a secret job like this one.
Col. Breen: Then I'm glad you don't talk about it.

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