343 quotes found
"We're bobbing along in our barrel. Some of us tip right over the edge. But there's one thing really mystifying It's got me laughing, now it's got me crying All my life I'll be death defying Till I know..."
"I wonder wonder why the wonder falls I wonder why the wonder falls on me I wonder wonder why the wonder falls With everything I touch and hear and see."
"We teeter along on our tightrope Some of us trip and damage our heads Poppin' pills is really stupefying Get you crawling when you could be flying"
"Don't you ever think about this life And how strange it all can seem? Only way to find the answers out Is to wake up from its golden dream."
"I've got to find out from where the wonder falls."
"Caroline Dhavernas - Jaye Tyler"
"Katie Finneran - Sharon Tyler"
"Tyron Leitso - Eric Gotts"
"William Sadler - Darrin Tyler"
"Diana Scarwid - Karen Tyler"
"Lee Pace - Aaron Tyler"
"Tracie Thoms - Mahandra McGinty"
"Take my love Take my land Take me where I cannot stand I don't care I'm still free You can't take the sky from me."
"Take me out To the black Tell them I ain't coming back Burn the land And boil the sea You can't take the sky from me."
"There's no place I can be Since I found Serenity But you can't take the sky from me."
"So I wanted to get a show that took the past and the future, and put them together by making them feel like the present…"
"And I wanted to say "Hi" to all the Firefly flans in— "flans"? I wanted to say "Hi" to all you Firefly flans out there. You flans are the best flans a… actor could ever hope for. Keep being a good flan!"
"So here's what I have to say about Serenity: This is the kind of movie that I have always intended Ender's Game to be (though the plots are not at all similar). And this is as good a movie as I always hoped Ender's Game would be. And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made. I'd rather just watch Serenity again."
"Nothing like a movie deal to make you feel better about your TV show getting cancelled!"
"People watch Firefly and they think, boy you guys must have a lot of fun there, you must have a great time, the high jinks that ensue. Well, the truth is, there are no high jinks, we're absolutely serious. We're very professional and we never, ever make mistakes. [fumbles with camera] How'dya turn this fuckin' thing off?"
"This show isn't about the people who made history; it's about the people history stepped on."
"Every story needs a monster. In the stories of the old west it was the Apaches. I used that example by saying that anyone who goes out into space and goes mad can become a monster."
"Tim Minear: She had this magic syringe. She would take this drug. And if she were, for instance, raped, the rapist would die a horrible death. The story was that she gets kidnapped by Reavers and when Mal finally got to the ship to save her from the Reavers, he gets on the Reaver ship and all the Reavers are dead. Which would suggest a kind of really bad assault. At the end of the episode, he comes in after she's been horribly brutalized, and he comes in and he gets down on his knee, and he takes her hand. And he treats her like a lady. And that's the kind of stuff that we wanted to do. It was very dark. And this was actually the first story that Joss pitched to me when he asked me to come work on the show. He said, 'These are the kind of stories we're going to do.'"
"Nathan Fillion — Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds"
"Morena Baccarin — Inara Serra"
"Adam Baldwin — Jayne Cobb"
"Ron Glass — Shepherd Derrial Book"
"Summer Glau — River Tam"
"Sean Maher — Dr. Simon Tam"
"Jewel Staite — Kaywinnit Lee "Kaylee" Frye"
"Gina Torres — Zoe Alleyne Washburne"
"Alan Tudyk — Hoban "Wash" Washburne"
"Somebody at one point said something about the fact that I’ve ended up with, or have chosen, these roles where it’s me. . . not necessarily against, but rivalling these [male] characters: the triptych of Mulder, Hannibal and Spector [the killer from The Fall]. That I find myself in those situations, those roles. I mean, Mulder’s not really a predator, we’re not in that dance, but there’s tension. Various forms of both intellectual and sexual tension."
"It's a curious time to be doing the show because everything is upside-down. There's been a flip since we were first on the air. Now it's as though people don't trust science anymore. In fact, they don't trust anything! Although they do believe in something: They believe in conspiracy theories, more than ever, it seems."
"There is a lot of soul there. But, you know, I do think there's also something to the fact that we kind of flip-flopped the gender roles early on, before it was ‘smart,’ or whatever, to do. Mulder was kind of this guy being instinctual, emotional, irrational, while Gillian—Scully—was rational and stoic. At least in TV terms, I think that was revolutionary, and it strengthened our performances because it was something Gillian and I could both sink our teeth into."
"The frame of The X-Files, which started out as a pretty much straight-ahead thriller/mystery/horror genre science-fiction show, kind of started to mold and get more flexible as writers like Glen Morgan and James Wong and then Vince [Gilligan] and then Darin Morgan took it into a more comedic area, sometimes into a more horror area. And the show started to bend and it never broke, and I think that's a testament to the vision that [showrunner Chris Carter] had in the beginning, which I don't think he had consciously. But he created a show that could bend and could grow, and he had the luck or the foresight to hire writers that were going to take his baby and turn it into something else from time to time."
"I think [Carter] made two characters who were complementary to one another, and kind of completed one another in the romantic comedy sense. You know, they had aspects of a personality that the other was lacking, and I think because it took so long for them to be physical in any way there was a certain ache to the show. ... That wasn't what the show was about. The show was about the cases; the show was about the quest. Whatever the show was about, it wasn't about this relationship. That's kind of, I think, the magic of the relationship and the show, is that it was never the point of the show — it always happened in the spaces of the show."
"The X-Files form of American folk paranoia wasn’t just part of the zeitgeist. It was a lot older and a lot deeper. It’s very much part of American culture. I’d been reading Fortean Times [the journal of unexplained phenomena, named after one of Mulder’s spiritual antecedents, the paranormal researcher Charles Fort, who was born in 1874] almost since it began and The X-Files was a gloriously pulped-out version of that."
"The very idea that the corrupt and the murky could be centred on something as crazy as a government cover-up of aliens in Area 51 now seems almost quaint. The X-Files is actually a naively optimistic show from a time when America hadn’t been so deeply threatened and could turn its attention inward. Any show that opens every episode by asserting ‘The truth is out there’ is fundamentally pretty optimistic and open-minded."
"The Gothic tradition concerns things lurking in the beyond and monsters that often represent ourselves. It’s traditionally looked at how big institutions like the church and state are in fact fundamentally corrupt. That idea of the evil within is a very X-Files thing. Both Gothic literature and The X-Files are about taking that walk into the dark woods and facing what we can’t define. That’s essentially what Mulder does in the show."
"I’m laying in bed in my hotel room in Japan. At the time there is no Netflix, no cable, no nothing — just three channels playing game shows. All of the sudden there were these five kids in spandex fighting monsters. Don’t ask me why, but I fell in love. It was so campy!"
"Frankie Muniz - Malcolm"
"Jane Kaczmarek - Lois"
"Bryan Cranston - Hal"
"Justin Berfield - Reese"
"Erik Per Sullivan - Dewey"
"Christopher Kennedy Masterson - Francis"
"James Rodriguez and Lukas Rodriguez - Jamie"
"Craig Lamar Traylor - Stevie Kenarban"
"David Anthony Higgins - Craig Feldspar"
"Emy Coligado - Piama Tananahaakna"
"Eric Nenninger - Eric Hanson"
"Daniel von Bargen - Commandant Edwin Spangler"
"Cloris Leachman - Grandma Ida"
"They had us on a schedule and decided to put on a different show which promptly tanked. We're sensitive to where they put us on in the week [Friday nights]. If they put us back where we were [Tuesdays], we would have been fine. Creatively, though, we had a great third season mapped out, but we won't see it now."
"Once we all got in a room in June we just started talking about ‘Who is Max? What would happen in her world?’ I had this notion that Max would go into heat and that became Heat. We had this idea about Max not getting her medicine and ending up in jail, and that became Flushed. C.R.E.A.M. came about because we thought, ‘If we really are positing this relationship between Max and Logan, who is Logan? What makes him tick? Wouldn’t it be cool for Max to get a look at his world?’ That’s really how things unfold."
"Quinn Mallory: [season one monologue/opening] What if you could find brand new worlds right here on Earth? Where anything is possible. Same planet, different dimension. I've found the gateway."
"Quinn Mallory: What if you could travel to parallel worlds? The same year, the same Earth, only different dimensions. A world where the Russians rule America... or where your dreams of being superstar came true... or where San Francisco was a maximum-security prison. My friends and I found the gateway. Now the problem is... finding a way back home."
"They took the attitude of ‘Oh, we don’t want to get into politics, we don’t want to get into dark humor, we don’t want to get into cerebral stuff. We’ve got four characters, and they’re sliding from world to world, and if they land on the world where everyone’s a pirate, they can chase each other around with swords, so that’s going to be fun. That’s show Number One.’ That was kind of the attitude all year"
"Originally, Ryan was going to be in several episodes at the start of the second season, and I worked out with Jacob Epstein, who was also executive producer that year, the path that Ryan would take. We had in mind three or four shows to do with him. By the fourth show, something shocking was going to happen with him."
"Their attitude was ‘We’ve been off the air for so long no one is going to care, so let’s just say that Quinn got shot but he’s better now, and let’s pretend the other people never came through the gate with them.’ I know people find this hard to believe, but I argued with them over this for months and got the reputation for being a troublemaker or a loose cannon, because I wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer."
"Cleavant Derricks - Rembrandt "Crying Man" Brown (all seasons)"
"Jerry O'Connell - Quinn Mallory (season 1-4)"
"Kari Wührer - Capt. Maggie Beckett (season 3-5)"
"Sabrina Lloyd - Wade Welles (season 1-3)"
"John Rhys-Davies - Prof. Maximillian Arturo (season 1-3)"
"Elisabeth Harnois - Christina Nickson"
"Grant Show - Lucas Boyd"
"Samuel Page - Jesse Parker"
"Aubrey Dollar - Judy Kramer"
"Dina Meyer - Amber Hargrove"
"Cameron Richardson - Paula Hargrove"
"Brent Weber - Terry Burke"
"Susan Walters - Meg Kramer"
"Richard Burgi - Ben Kramer"
"Clare Carey - Sarah Parker"
"Adam Busch - Wes"
"Alex Carter - Sheriff Logan Parker"
"John Diehl - David Burke"
"Marcus Coloma - Father Tomas"
"Lance Henriksen - FBI Special Agent Frank Black"
"Megan Gallagher - Catherine Black (seasons 1–2, guest season 3)"
"Klea Scott - FBI Special Agent Emma Hollis (season 3)"
"Terry O'Quinn - Peter Watts"
"Brittany Tiplady - Jordan Black"
"Bill Smitrovich - Lt. Robert Bletcher (season 1)"
"Stephen J. Lang - Det. Bob Giebelhouse"
"C. C. H. Pounder - Cheryl Andrews"
"Sarah-Jane Redmond - Lucy Butler"
"Kristen Cloke - Lara Means (season 2)"
"Allan Zinyk - Brian Roedecker (season 2)"
"Stephen E. Miller - Andy McClaren (season 3)"
"Peter Outerbridge - Barry Baldwin (season 3)"
"Scott Wolf - Bailey Salinger"
"Matthew Fox - Charlie Salinger"
"Neve Campbell - Julia Salinger"
"Lacey Chabert - Claudia Salinger"
"Jennifer Love Hewitt - Sarah Reeves"
"Jeremy London - Griffin Holbrook"
"Paula Devicq - Kirsten Bennett"
"Scott Grimes - Will McCorkle"
"Michael Goorjian - Justin Thompson"
"Alexondra Lee - Callie Martel"
"Tom Mason - Joe Mangus"
"The way we look at So You Think You Can Dance is that the days of being a dancer who specializes in one thing - 'I do this and that's it' - are dwindling. Dancers today know they have to do all kinds of movement. And that's a beautiful thing to see, for us, in our Dance [sic] world."
"[The show is an] immoral abuse of young people ... it's commercial television, and they'll do anything for ratings. It's taking advantage of these very young kids who want that kind of exposure."
"I love the So You Think You Can Dance show. I love it. I think it’s some of the best hours on TV. I think those dancers are extraordinary and, more so, I think those choreographers are uniformly amazing."
"At its best, the show provides a kind of kicky fun, the good side of cheesy. But it’s also outdated and perpetuates many stereotypes about what constitutes good dance (speed is in, subtlety is out), what language is used to describe it and how training makes boring dancers."
"Peter Horton - Ezekiel Stone"
"John Glover - The Devil"
"María Costa - Teresita/Waitress"
"Stacy Haiduk - Rosalyn Stone"
"Albert Hall - Father Cletus Horn"
"Scott Lawrence - Lt. Fraker"
"Lori Petty - Maxine"
"Teri Polo - Det. Ash/Ashur Badaktu"
"The Mother Of All DESTINY"
"Take back the future."
"Everything he is, everything he will be, depends on her."
"[Season 1] This season, a mother will become a warrior, a son will become a hero, and their only ally will be a friend from the future."
"[Season 2] This season, allies become enemies, a boy becomes a man, and the terminator saga is reborn."
"Lena Headey - Sarah Connor"
"Thomas Dekker - John Connor"
"Summer Glau - Cameron"
"Brian Austin Green - Derek Reese"
"Richard T. Jones - James Ellison"
"Garret Dillahunt - Cromartie"
"Shirley Manson - Catherine Weaver"
"Time changes everything"
"Thomas Calabro - Dr. Michael Mancini"
"Josie Bissett - Jane Andrews Mancini"
"Amy Locane - Sandy Harling"
"Heather Locklear - Amanda Woodward"
"Marcia Cross - Dr. Kimberly Shaw"
"Laura Leighton - Sydney Andrews"
"Doug Savant - Matt Fielding"
"Grant Show - Jake Hanson"
"Andrew Shue - Billy Campbell"
"Courtney Thorne-Smith - Alison Parker"
"Jack Wagner - Dr. Peter Burns"
"Vanessa Williams - Rhonda Blair"
"Daphne Zuniga - Jo Reynolds"
"Kristin Davis - Brooke Armstrong"
"Patrick Muldoon - Richard Hart"
"David Charvet - Craig Field"
"Kelly Rutherford - Megan Lewis"
"Brooke Langton - Samantha Reilly"
"Alyssa Milano - Jennifer Mancini"
"Rob Estes - Kyle McBride"
"Lisa Rinna - Taylor McBride"
"Jamie Luner - Lexi Sterling"
"Linden Ashby - Dr. Brett Cooper"
"Rena Sofer - Eve Cleary"
"John Haymes Newton - Ryan McBride"
"Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman"
"Kelli Williams as Dr. Gillian Foster"
"Brendan Hines as Eli Loker"
"Monica Raymund as Ria Torres"
"Mekhi Phifer as Agent Ben Reynolds"
"Hayley McFarland as Emily Lightman"
"Adrian Pasdar - Jim Profit"
"Lisa Zane - Joanne Meltzer"
"Keith Szarabajka - Charles Henry "Chaz" Gracen"
"Jack Gwaltney - Pete Gracen"
"Allison Hossack - Nora Gracen"
"Lisa Darr - Gail Koner"
"Lisa Blount - Bobbi Stakowski"
"Sherman Augustus - Jeffrey Sykes"
"Scott Paulin - Jack Walters"
"Jay Baruchel - Steven Karp"
"Carla Gallo - Lizzie Exley"
"Charlie Hunnam - Lloyd Haythe"
"Monica Keena - Rachel Lindquist"
"Seth Rogen - Ron Garner"
"Timm Sharp - Marshall Nesbitt"
"Loudon Wainwright III - Hal Karp"
"Jason Segal - Eric"
"Mark Valley - Christopher Chance"
"Chi McBride - Detective Laverne Winston"
"Jackie Earle Haley - Guerrero"
"Indira Varma - Ilsa Pucci"
"Janet Montgomery - Ames"
"Emmanuelle Vaugier - FBI Special Agent Emma Barnes"
"Autumn Reeser - Layla"
"Leonor Varela - Maria Gallego"
"Lennie James - Baptiste"
"Armand Assante - The Old Man"
"Tony Hale - Harry"
"Geoff Stults - Walter Sherman"
"Michael Clarke Duncan - Leo Knox"
"Mercedes Masohn - Deputy U.S. Marshal Isabel Zambada"
"Maddie Hasson as Willa Monday"
"Kiefer Sutherland - Martin Bohm"
"David Mazouz - Jacob "Jake" Bohm"
"Maria Bello - Lucy Robbins (season 2)"
"Lukas Haas - Calvin Norburg"
"Saxon Sharbino - Amelia "Amy" Robbins"
"Gugu Mbatha-Raw - Clea Hopkins (season 1)"
"Danny Glover - Professor Arthur Teller (season 1)"
"Saïd Taghmaoui - Guillermo Ortiz (season 2)"
"Tom Mison — Ichabod Crane"
"Nicole Beharie — Lt. Grace Abigail "Abbie" Mills"
"Orlando Jones — Capt. Frank Irving"
"Katia Winter — Katrina Crane"
"Lyndie Greenwood — Jennifer "Jenny" Mills"
"John Noble — Henry Parish/Jeremy Crane"
"John Cho — Det. Andy Brooks"
"Nicholas Gonzalez — Det. Luke Morales"
"Clancy Brown — Sheriff August Corbin"
"Neil Jackson — Abraham Van Brunt/The Headless Horseman"
"Matt Barr — Nicholas "Nick" Hawley"
"Sakina Jaffrey — Sheriff Leena Reyes"
"Rachel Nichols - Rebecca Locke/Becky George"
"Jay Harrington - Paul Ryan"
"Adam Baldwin - Danny Love"
"Katie Finneran - Melody Sim"
"Nelsan Ellis - Carter Howard"
"Peter Coyote - Virgil "Web" Webster"
"This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: (1) Test ideas by experiment and observation (2) Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail (3) Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and (4) Question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours."
"Many of us suspect that all of this - all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe - is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes; a multiverse. Universe upon universe; worlds without end."
"Stars . . . get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars. You, me, everyone: we are made of star stuff."
"Every person you've ever heard of lived somewhere in there [pointing]. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar."
"Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars."
"This is a story about you . . . and me . . . and your dog."
"If life has a sanctuary, it's here in the nucleus, which contains our DNA - the ancient scripture of our genetic code. And it's written in a language that all life can read."
"The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience."
"That nameless corridor? That's for another day. (While standing near the as-yet-unnamed, sixth corridor in the "Halls of Extinction.")"
"[On] Titan, Saturn's giant moon . . . the seas and the rain are made not of water but of methane and ethane. . . . [W]e can imagine other kinds of life. There might be creatures that inhale hydrogen instead of oxygen. And exhale methane instead of carbon dioxide. They might use acetylene instead of sugar as an energy source."
"Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers."
"Does the fact that most of us know the names of mass murderers but never heard of Jan Oort say anything about us?"
"Newton's Principia Mathematica set us free. . . . By finding the natural laws governing the comings and goings of comets, he decoupled the motions of the heavens from their ancient connections to our fears."
"Like Babe Ruth predicting where his next home run would land in the stands, Halley stated flatly that the comet would return at the end of 1758, from a particular part of the sky, following a specific path."
"Newton's laws made it possible for Edmond Halley to see some 50 years into the future and predict the behavior of a single comet."
"Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now our home galaxy - the Milky Way - will merge with our neighboring galaxy - Andromeda. . . . Any life on the worlds of that far off future . . . would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show; a dance of a half a trillion stars, to music first heard on one little world, by a man who had but one true friend."
"Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts."
"When [the light we see today] left the Pleiades, about 400 years ago, Galileo was taking his first look through a telescope."
"In the observed universe, everyone gets to feel special . . . at the center of the cosmic horizon. . . . It's what you get when you have a finite speed of light in a universe that had a beginning in time."
"Nature commands, "Thou shalt not add my speed to the speed of light." . . . For reality to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit."
"Black holes may very well be tunnels through the universe. [If you could somehow survive the ride on] this intergalactic subway system, you could travel to the farthest reaches of spacetime, or you might arrive in someplace even more amazing. We might find ourselves in an altogether different universe."
"The age and size of the cosmos are written in light. The nature of beauty and the substance of the stars, the laws of space and time they were there all along, but we never saw them until we devised a more powerful way of seeing."
"In China, more than 2,000 years ago, a philosopher named Mo Tzu is said to have observed that light could be made to paint a picture inside a locked treasure room. This was the description of the first camera: the camera obscura, the prototype of all image-forming cameras (including the one that's bringing you this picture)."
"[The scientific method is so] powerful that it has carried our robotic emissaries to the edge of the solar system and beyond. It has doubled our lifespan, made the lost worlds of the past come alive. Science has enabled us to predict events in the distant future and to communicate with each other at the speed of light, as I am with you, right at this moment."
"Show me the spectrum of anything, whether here on Earth or from a distant star, and I'll tell you what it's made of. Fraunhofer's lines are the atomic signatures of the elements writ large across the cosmos. As with every other major revelation in the history of science, it opened the way to newer and deeper mysteries."
"You never know where the next genius will come from. How many of them do we leave in the rubble? The prince and his kingdom were immeasurably enriched by that act of kindness to a poor orphan."
"Confining our perception of nature to visible light is like listening to music in only one octave."
"There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies in the known universe."
"The chloroplast is a three billion year-old solar energy collector. This sub-microscopic solar battery is what drives all the forests, and the fields, and the plankton of the seas, and the animals, including us."
"Thales kindled a flame that still burns to this day: the very idea of cosmos out of chaos, a universe governed by the order of natural laws that we can actually figure out. This is the epic adventure that began in the mind of Thales."
"The nucleus is very small compared to the rest of the atom. If an atom were the size of this cathedral, its nucleus would be the size of that mote of dust."
"[The Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detector] is a trap designed to catch neutrinos only. Other particles, such as cosmic rays . . . cannot get through all that rock above us. But matter poses no obstacle to a neutrino. A neutrino could pass through a hundred light years of steel without even slowing down."
"Are there any mementos from when the Earth was born, objects that could possibly tell us its true age? I know a place where the unused bricks and mortar left over from the creation of our solar system can be found. It lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars."
"What better way to find the true age of the Earth than with the uranium atom? If you knew what fraction of the uranium in a rock had turned into lead, you could calculate how much time had passed since the rock was formed."
"Now at last, Patterson was ready to tackle the iron meteorite, to find the true age of the Earth. [He discovered that the] world is four and a half billion years old. . . . His reward for this discovery? A world of trouble."
"[[w:Tetraethyllead | [T]etraethyl lead]] could be marketed as an anti-knock additive to gasoline [but a] half a cup of it on your skin could kill you. . . . What was needed was a man of science to calm the public's fears and improve lead's image. . . . This was one of the first times that the authority of science was used to cloak a threat to public health and the environment."
"No matter where he searched on Earth, no matter how far he traveled back in time, the . . . naturally occurring [lead] levels in the air and water in the past were far lower. . . . [[w:Clair Cameron Patterson#Campaign against lead poisoning | Patterson fought the industry for [more than] 20 years]] before lead was finally banned in US [gasoline and other] consumer products."
"Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature will not be fooled."
"For thousands of generations we watched the stars as if our lives depended on it, because they did. . . . [O]ur ancestors noticed that the motions of the stars across the nights of the year foretold changes on Earth that threatened or enhanced our chances for survival."
"[The Harvard Observatory Computers included] Annie Jump Cannon, the leader of the team [who eventually] catalogued a quarter of a million stars, [and] Henrietta Swan Leavitt [who] discovered the law that astronomers still use more than a century later to measure the distances to the stars. . . . [Cannon provided classification data to Cecilia Payne, whose] "Stellar Atmospheres" is widely regarded as the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy."
"There are many kinds of stars. Some are bright like the Sun. Some are dim. The greatest stars are ten million times larger than the smallest ones. Some stars are old beyond imagining, more than ten billion years of age. Others are being born right now. When atoms fuse in the hearts of stars, they make starlight. Stars are born in litters, formed from the gas and dust of interstellar clouds."
"[Currently] our Sun is poised in a stable equilibrium between gravity and nuclear fire. . . . [F]our or five billion years from now . . . it will become bloated [and] will envelop and devour the planets Mercury and Venus and possibly the Earth. [Finally it will shrink] a hundredfold to the size of the Earth [and will be] a white dwarf star."
"The psychedelic death shrouds of ordinary stars are fleeting, lasting only tens of thousands of years. . . . The stars in a binary star system . . . [like] Sirius [and its companion] white dwarf [will create numerous novae as the system ages]. . . . A star about 15 times as massive as the Sun - one like Rigel - [will ignite] a more powerful nuclear reaction, a supernova [which will result in a pulsar]. . . . [F]or a star more than 30 times as massive as the Sun - a star like Alnilam, in Orion's Belt - [its supernova will create] a black hole. . . . [Finally, when a supermassive star like the largest in the Eta Carinae system] goes, it won't become a mere nova or supernova. It will become something far more catastrophic - a hypernova. And it could happen in our lifetime. . . . Earth will be just fine. . . . But still, Eta Carinae in its death throes will . . . light up the night of the southern hemisphere with the brightness of a second Moon."
"[D]uring the Carboniferous Period, the atmosphere had almost twice the oxygen as today. Insects could then grow much bigger and still get enough oxygen in their bodies. That's why the dragonflies here are as big as eagles and the millipedes the size of alligators."
"Two-thirds of the Earth lies beneath more than 1,000 feet of water. It's a vast and largely unexplored frontier. . . . This is the longest submarine mountain range in the world, the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge. It wraps around our globe like the seam on a baseball. The past is another planet, but most of us don't really know this one."
"Few animals larger than a hundred pounds survived the catastrophes of the late Cretaceous. The dust cloud brought night and cold to the surface for months. The dinosaurs froze and starved to death. But there were small creatures who took shelter in the Earth. And when they emerged they found that the monsters who had hunted and terrorized them were gone. The Earth was becoming the Planet of the Mammals. And the Earth continued its ceaseless changing."
"The way the planets tug at each other, the way the skin of the Earth moves, the way those motions affect climate and the evolution of life and intelligence - they all combined to give us the means to turn the mud of those river deltas into the first civilizations."
"Congratulations. You're alive. There's an unbroken thread that stretches across more than three billion years that connects us to the first life that ever touched this world. Think of how tough, resourceful and lucky all of our countless ancestors must have been to survive long enough to pass on the message of life to the next and the next and the next generation, hundreds of millions of times before it came to us. . . . Each of us is a runner in the longest and most dangerous relay race there ever was, and at this moment, we hold the baton in our hands."
"I could be thousands of miles away, and yet, when you turn on whatever device is bringing my image and voice to you, I'm there. Instantaneously. How is that possible? . . . It all began in the mind of one person. . . . This is the story of how we learned to make electrons do our bidding."
"This was the first motor converting electric current into continuous mechanical motion. Looks pretty feeble, right? But that turning spindle is the beginning of a revolution, one that dwarfs all the shots fired and bombs ever detonated in the sheer magnitude of its effect on our civilization."
"By age 40, [Michael Faraday] had invented the electric motor, the transformer, the generator; machines that would change everything about the home, the farm, the factory. Now, at 60 . . . plagued by memory loss and melancholy, he fearlessly probed deeper into the mysterious invisible forces. . . . Having discovered the unity of electricity, magnetism and light, Faraday needed to know how this trinity of natural forces work together."
"[W]hy does our planet have a magnetic field at all? . . . Liquid iron, circulating around the solid part of the core as Earth rotates, acts like a wire carrying an electric current. And as Faraday showed us, electric currents produce magnetic fields. And that's a good thing. Our magnetic field protects us from the onslaught of cosmic rays, which would be very damaging to our biosphere."
"[Faraday's] fellow scientists . . . needed to see his ideas expressed in the language of modern physics - precise equations. [Then] James Clerk Maxwell . . . translated Faraday's experimental observations on electromagnetic fields into equations [and helped transform] human civilization from a patchwork of cities, towns and villages into an intercommunicating organism linking us at light speed to each other and to the cosmos."
"[L]ife itself sends its own stories across billions of years. It's a message that every one of us carries inside, inscribed in all the cells of our bodies, in a language that all life on Earth can read. The genetic code is written in an alphabet consisting of only four letters. Each letter is a molecule made of atoms; each word is three letters long."
"The essential message of life has been copied and recopied for more than 3 billion years. But where did that message come from? Nobody knows. Perhaps it began in a shallow, sunlit pool, just like this. . . . Or life could've started in the searing heat of a volcanic vent on the deep sea floor. Or is it possible that life came to Earth as a hitchhiker?"
"We've encoded our stories in radio waves and beamed them into space . . . for over 70 years. [And [[w:Search for extraterrestrial intelligence | since] 1960, we've been listening for extraterrestrial radio signals]] without hearing so much as a tolling bell. . . . For all we know, we may have just missed an alien signal. [Or perhaps a civilization] even slightly more advanced than ours may have already moved on to some other mode of communication."
"Whether or not we ever make contact with intelligent alien life may depend on a critical question: What is the life expectancy of a civilization? . . . Today, we have a single global civilization. How long will it live? . . . We're pumping greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere at a rate not seen on Earth for a million years. And there's scientific consensus that we're destabilizing our climate."
"The next golden age of human achievement begins here and now: New Year's Day of the next cosmic year. In the first tenth of a second, we take the vision of the Pale Blue Dot to heart, and learn how to share this tiny world with each other . . . as the effects of climate change reverse and diminish. A fifth of a second into this future people will stop dying from the effects of poverty. The planet is now a completely self-sustaining, intercommunicating organism."
"Why is Venus scorching hot? It's because . . . the flow of energy is blocked by a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. . . . Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect."
"By burning coal, oil and gas, our civilization is exhaling carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can absorb it. So, CO2 is building up in the atmosphere. The planet is heating up."
"It's a pretty tight case. Our fingerprints are all over this one."
"Keep your eye on the man, not the dog. (Comparing the gradual curve of Tyson's path along a beach to climate and the erratic path of a dog Tyson is holding on a leash to weather.)"
"More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere."
"We looked back on our way to the Moon and saw "one world, indivisible, and kind of small. . . . This . . . was the unexpected gift of Apollo.""
"[M]ore than two millennia ago, in the city of Alexandria . . . [t]he Ptolemys [built] the greatest library on Earth. . . . The total work product of the awakening of ancient civilization was kept here. . . . And all of it, all of this is but a tiny fraction of the information that you have at your fingertips at this very moment [in] our own electronic Library of Alexandria."
"There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale to push the cosmos apart. . . . We call it "dark energy," but that name, like "dark matter," is merely a code word for our ignorance. It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there."
"The difference between seeing nothing but a pebble and reading the history of the cosmos inscribed inside it is science. (Discussing a slow-growing manganese nodule from the ocean floor which shows that a star near the Earth went supernova within the last two million years or so.)"
"There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we've ever known. (Recording of Carl Sagan's voice over a re-imagining of the "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth taken by Voyager 1.)"
"How did we escape from the prison [of ignorance]? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart. (1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. Think for yourself. Question yourself. (2) Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. (3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong! Get over it. (4) Follow the evidence, wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all: (5) Remember, you could be wrong."
"Open your eyes, and open your imagination. The next great discovery could be yours. - U.S. President Barack Obama, introducing the series premiere."
"What Cosmos has, at its heart, is hope. It's about the future we could have if we get our act together. - Ann Druyan, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos, as well as an executive producer and director for the 2014 Cosmos."
"Civilization {should know} how to preserve itself. That's a good measure of intelligence, isn't it? Seeing what you're doing that's bad, and fixing that problem. - Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, series presenter / host."
"The important thing is not to suppress ideas. Freedom of thought is the life blood of science. That’s why {Giordano} Bruno’s story is important. - Astrophysicist Steven Soter, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos."
"We've reached a point in time where we've gotten a little lax with our enthusiasm about science and our thirst for knowledge. . . . I hope that this Cosmos can instigate a reawakening of the same enthusiasm for science that the original Cosmos brought. - Seth MacFarlane, series executive producer."
"My greatest hope for this new Cosmos is that it has the same impact on someone, somewhere that the original had on me. Because it inspired in me a great interest in science, and in my case, science fiction. - Brannon Braga, series executive producer."
"You can't escape what you are."
"Family is the Ultimate Power"
"Stephen Moyer - Reed Strucker (Season 1)"
"Amy Acker - Caitlin Strucker (Season 1)"
"Natalie Alyn Lind - Lauren Strucker (Season 1)"
"Percy Hynes White - Andy Strucker (Season 1)"
"Sean Teale - Marcos Diaz (Season 1)"
"Blair Redford - John Proudstar (Season 1)"
"Emma Dumont - Lorna Dane (Season 1)"
"Jamie Chung - Clarice Fong (Season 1)"
"Coby Bell - Jace Turner (Season 1)"
"Seth MacFarlane as Capt. Ed Mercer"
"Adrianne Palicki as Cmdr. Kelly Grayson"
"Penny Johnson Jerald as Dr. Claire Finn"
"Scott Grimes as Lt. Gordon Malloy"
"Peter Macon as Lt. Cmdr. Bortus"
"J. Lee as Lt. (later Lt. Cmdr.) John LaMarr"
"Mark Jackson as Isaac"
"Halston Sage as Lt. Alara Kitan (Season 1; Season 2, episodes 1-3, guest appearance in episode 14; guest appearance in "New Horizons" episode 10)"
"Jessica Szohr as Lt. (later Lt. Cmdr.) Talla Keyali (Season 2, episode 5 onward)"
"Anne Winters as Ensign Charly Burke ("New Horizon" season)"
"Kim Cattrall - Margaret Monreaux"
"Melia Kreiling - Ginger Sweet"
"Aubrey Dollar - Rose Monreaux"
"Corey Cott - Eric Monreaux"
"Benjamin Levy Aguilar - Antonio Rivera"
"Mark L. Young - Jason Conley / Mark"
"Olivia Macklin - Becky Monreaux"
"Aaron Lazar - Reverend Paul Luke Thomas"
"Gerald McRaney - Eugene Monreaux"
"Tom Payne - Malcolm Bright"
"Lou Diamond Phillips - Gil Arroyo"
"Halston Sage - Ainsley Whitly"
"Aurora Perrineau - Dani Powell"
"Frank Harts - JT Tarmel"
"Keiko Agena - Edrisa Tanaka"
"Bellamy Young - Jessica Whitly"
"Michael Sheen - Martin Whitly"
"Michael Raymond-James - John Watkins"
"Armando Acevedo - Hector"
"Dermot Mulroney - Nicholas Endicott"
"Christian Borle - Friar Pete (season 2)"
"Catherine Zeta-Jones - Vivian Capshaw (season 2)"
"Élodie Yung - Thony De La Rosa"
"Adan Canto - Arman Morales (seasons 1–2)"
"Oliver Hudson - Garrett Miller"
"Martha Millan - Fiona De La Rosa"
"Sebastien and Valentino LaSalle - Luca De La Rosa"
"Sean Lew - Chris"
"Faith Bryant - Jaz"