All Quotes

"I almost beat Maggie's high score."

"It's not my fault. The buttons were sticky."

"The Eagle has landed."

"This game cheats."

"A professor once told me, 'Astronomers are geologists with clean hands and a squint'."

"Another random hole bulldozed by our fearless leader."

"Boston -- it didn't just bring me to life. It brought me -- to LIFE."

"I feel like I never knew what good health was until today."

"It's almost worth falling through holes on alien planets, if you feel this good afterwards."

"(distracting an alien monster) Come on, you ponderous exoskeleton... you cocoon-eating lobster-faced cave-dwelling arthropoidal alimentary sphincter muscle!"

"After so many years of bad TV shows and crackpot phony pictures, HERE is the real proof. There IS alien life."

"Just when this place starts looking benign, it finds new ways to be dangerous."

"Great. You get to look for metal things lying around on the ground while I have to decode a completely alien language without any information about how they think or what they might be writing about. Yeah, that's a fair division of labour."

"The Eye sees into all space and time. And where the Eye sees, the mind can fly."

"There are two ways to protect your planet. One is if you return and warn them to stay away. The other is if you never return at all. Which warning do you think will be more effective?"

"What raises the dead can debase the living."

"I am the doer who undoes, the creator who uncreates. And yet I would gladly be the destroyer who undestroys, the dangerous one who protects."

"Ken Borden: Whether the stone hits the glass, or the glass hits the stone... it aint gonna hurt the stone.""

"Boston Low: Low to Borden, do you copy? Ken Borden: How do you think I passed my NASA exams?""

"Boston Low: Low to Borden, do you copy? Ken Borden: Like carbon paper boss!""

"Cora Miles: "My advice is - if you can pick it up, take it with you - because you never know when you might need it." Ken Borden: I thought that only applied to women in bars. If you can pick her up... (laughs)"

"Boston Low: Attila is more dangerous now than when we first tamed it. Maggie Robbins: Those were certainly profound words for first steps on Earth's new moon."

"Ludger Brink: A good archaeologist doesn't expect to make any sense unless he's been digging at a site for years. Boston Low: We don't HAVE years. Ludger Brink: Maybe years are all we have."

"Boston Low: "This place is as desolate as the Midwest. Maggie Robbins: ALMOST as desolate as the Midwest."

"Boston Low: Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. Maggie Robbins: "If only I had some ruby slippers."

"Ludger Brink: Your name will live forever as the boneheaded space hero who destroyed precious data at the first alien archaeological site. Boston Low: That's better than having my name live forever as the commander of an expedition that disappeared and was never heard from again."

"Ludger Brink: I think we can safely say it is not a natural weather phenomenon. Boston LowHow about a mirage? Anyone voting for it being a mirage?"

"Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane."

"Boston Low: We triggered it in that ship and now it's leading us. Ludger Brink: Do you mean this is the last gasp of a holographic tour guide? Boston Low: Or the port authority. Maybe it's saying we're under arrest. Come quietly or self-aiming lasers will toast us to cinders in fifteen seconds. Maggie Robbins: Stop it! Maybe you think that's funny, but the last thing I need is some mischievous boy trying to give me the creeps. Boston Low: If I wanted to give you the creeps, I'd tell you that it was the ghost of a long dead alien. Maggie Robbins: How do you know it ISN'T a ghost? Ludger Brink: What, do you think this is where aliens end up when they die? If it is, then this better be hell, because it sure isn't my idea of heaven. Boston Low: Now you're starting to give ME the creeps."

"Boston Low: Brink isn't dead anymore, Maggie. Maggie Robbins: You have a very sick sense of humour. Goodbye. Boston Low: No wait! I'm serious! Ludger Brink: Deadly serious."

"Boston Low: This place is as empty as an ancient ruin -- but at the same time, almost everything is still in working order. Ludger Brink: I know what you mean. This must have been how the bears' house felt to Goldilocks."

"Boston Low: What's the project you're working on, Brink? Ludger Brink: You're not a scientist. There's no way you would understand it. Boston Low: Oh, I get it. I can figure out alien technologies, turn the power on, work the tram system, adjust the lightbridge lenses... repair broken door control panels, and even resurrect one dead scientist -- but no, I'd NEVER understand YOUR work."

"Ludger Brink: Come here, you phlegm-carapaced slime-faced mucus-brained furry-legged abductor of luminously intelligent but pulchritudinous Earth women! (Low doesn't move) Ludger Brink: Low, you idiot! Why are you standing there? Boston Low: I'm still trying to figure out what you said."

"Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed."

"The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women."

"The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement."

"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing."

"No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders."

"Sexism is here a misleading name for misogyny, which is distrust, hatred and contempt of women. And it's not just men who feel these feelings and act on them. Women persecute other women, humiliate them and discriminate against them. They may not grab their tits or threaten to rape them; women have more effective ways of doing other women in. "Horizontal hostility", another gem from the Flo Kennedy thesaurus, is a by-product of oppression. Oppressed people don’t dare denounce the actual oppressor; instead they betray the people alongside them. They see their shared suffering as the consequence of a defect within themselves. What should be anger becomes guilt and self-blame. This process can be discerned clearly and repeatedly in the caseload of the Everyday Sexism project. Though much of what is reported is criminal behaviour and not normalised at all, as the victims persist in imagining that whatever happened was their fault, there can be no access to redress. They should be furious but are terrified and ashamed instead. As long as a rape victim is considered to need anonymity, she is expected to shoulder shame and self-hatred as a consequence of someone else’s behaviour. Enough. Enough. Simply coughing up outrage into a blog will get us nowhere."

"How do we form ourselves into an activity — a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academic — the most useless people in the world."

"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."

"With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she undertakes, the more radical."

"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed."

"The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial."

"If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood — if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby."

"In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists, exists to beautify her."

"The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity."

"Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him..."

"Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother."

"Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen."