"Dear humanity, we regret bein' alien bastards, we regret comin' to Earth. And we most definitely regret that the Corps just blew up our raggedy-ass fleet! Ooh-rah!"

"Don't they teach you kids how to swear in basic anymore?"

"[The Master Chief lands on the In Amber Clad with a thud] For a brick, he flew pretty good!"

"Chief, get inside, gear up. We're taking this fight to the surface."

"The Elites are blind, Arbiter! But I will make them see."

"Ask the Oracle about Halo. How they would sacrifice us all for nothing."

"[from a recorded message] Our Prophets are false! Open your eyes, my brothers! They would use the faith of our forefathers to bring ruin to us all! The Great Journey is a -- [the message is paused]"

"[Abandoning the Prophet of Mercy to the infection form attacking him] The Great Journey waits for no one, brother...not even you."

"No enemy has ever withstood our might. The Flood too shall fail."

"There are those that said this day would never come...What are they to say now?"

"The Halo series is, obviously, not an allegory for America’s involvement in Iraq, or the war on terror, where America is the UNSC, the Covenant is radical Islam, and the Brutes and Elites are the Sunni and the Shi’a (or vice versa, it would be idiotic and wrong to try to map one onto the other anyway). It’s a ridiculous idea that breaks down in any number of flagrant ways. Obviously the first Halo came out long before we invaded Iraq, and was conceived and planned even further back (I think it came out November 2001). And unlike the Iraqi insurgents, the Covenant have, or at least had, technological superiority, and they don’t go in for terrorist tactics — they’re toe-to-toe fighters. And they’re aliens. And they’re obsessed with purple things. And on and on."

"Bungie followed the unlikely lead of Argonaut Games’ Alien Resurrection, which mapped moving and aiming onto separate analog sticks over a year before the Xbox launched. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly."

"Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D. Even as a primitive vehicular prototype, emphasizing the physicality of the terrain, there wasn’t really anything that looked quite like it."

"I think the great tragedy of Halo is that for years and years it provided wonderful single-player and co-op content, and we provided people with almost no fun incentives or excuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay it. So Halo 1 built these 10 labor of love missions, and only if you decided to go back and replay them was there any incentive to do so."