Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

Edwin Richfield: Minister

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Quotes 

• 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.

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