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Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux in The Time Machine (1960)

Quotes

The Time Machine

Edit
  • Filby: Which three books would you have taken?
  • [last lines]
  • Mrs. Watchett: Mister Filby, do you think he'll ever return?
  • Filby: One cannot choose but wonder. You see, he has all the time in the world.
  • Talking Rings: The war between the East and West, which is now in it's three hundred and twenty-sixth year, has at last come to an end. There is nothing left to fight with, and few of us left to fight. The atmosphere has become so polluted with deadly germs that it can no longer be breathed. There is no place on this planet that is immune. The last surviving factory for the manufacturing of oxygen has been destroyed. Stockpiles are rapidly diminishing. And when they are gone, we must die.
  • Talking Rings: My name is of no consequence. The important thing you should know is that I am the last who remembers how each of us, man and woman, made his own decision. Some chose to take refuge in the great caverns and find a new way of life far below the earth's surface. The rest of us decided to take our chances in the sunlight, small as those chances might be.
  • George: What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams... *For what*? So you can swim and dance and play.
  • George: When I speak of time, gentlemen, I'm referring to the fourth dimension.
  • George: I've got to tell it now, David, while I still remember it.
  • Filby: Relax, try to relax. You've all the time in the world.
  • George: You're right, David... That's exactly what I have... All the time in the world.
  • Filby: If that machine can do what you say it can do, destroy it, George! Destroy it before it destroys you!
  • Filby: Alright. Take your, take your journey on your contraption. What would you become?... A Greek, a Roman, one of the pharaohs?
  • George: I prefer the future.
  • Filby: I think I understand. Look! See the imprint? This is where the time machine originally stood. But the Morlocks moved it. They dragged it across the lawn right into the sphinx... right here. And Weena was standing there when he last saw her... the same space--in a different time. So he moved back his heavy machine from here, across the room, scratching this floor. So that he can appear outside the sphinx again and help the Eloi build a new world... and a new world of his own.
  • Dr. Philip Hillyer: The space is space, it doesn't change. The same space that's here now should be here in 100 or even 1000 years!
  • Dr. Philip Hillyer: Well, the future's already there. It's irrevocable. It cannot be changed.
  • George: I wonder... Now that's the most important question to which I hope to find an answer... Can man control his destiny? Can he change the shape of things to come?
  • Filby: Why this preoccupation with time?
  • George: Why not?
  • Filby: Don't go simple on me, George.
  • George: All right, if you want to know the truth, I don't much care for the time I was born into. It seems people aren't dying fast enough these days. They call upon science to invent new, more efficient weapons to depopulate the Earth.
  • George: [while time traveling] The centuries rolled by... I put my trust in time, and waited for the rock to wear down around me.
  • George: [after arriving at the year 802,701] Nature tamed completely... and more bountiful than *ever* before. At last I'd found a paradise... But it would be no paradise if it belonged to me alone.
  • George: [having just departed 1917, the time machines starts rocking back and forth and side to side, George reaches for the back of the machine] Suddenly in 1940, I began to be buffeted from side to side, my first thought was the machine had some mechanical defect or a cog had gone wrong.
  • [George looks up through the skylight of his lab and sees barrage balloons appearing in the sky. He slowly stops the machine, stopping on June 19th, 1940 during the London Blitz. He sees several explosions in the sky amongst aircraft whizzing overhead. A brief scene of aerial combat is shown with two planes being shot down while George ponders in voice-over]
  • George: The last time I'd stopped was in 1917, 23 years ago... and the war with Germany was still raging, now in the air with... flying machines. Then I realized the truth of the matter; this was a new war.

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