"Secretary Rittenhouse served his country with full devotion. He resigned for personal reasons. Now, I can promise you this, Miss Lerner, all of you, everyone in this room and everyone listening to my voice, that at some point over the next ten months, all of us will entertain our worst fears and concerns. But I can also promise you this. Life will go on. We will prevail."

"Good evening. A few minutes ago, the United States ambassadors to every country in the world told the leaders of those nations what I'm about to tell you. It's a bit complicated, so we'll take some time, so I hope you'll bear with me, hear what I have to say. A little over a year ago, two American astronomers, Marcus Wolf and Leo Biederman, working on a mountaintop in Arizona, saw something in the night sky that caused them great concern. A comet. But the comet was... well, there was a remote possibility that the comet was on a path that could bring it into direct contact with the Earth. Now, we get hit all the time by rocks and meteors, some of them the size of cars, some no bigger than your hand. But the comet we discovered is the size of New York City, from the North side of Central Park to the Battery. About seven miles long. Put another way, this comet is larger than Mount Everest. It weighs 500 billion tons."

"Earth has a deadline"

"Alfre Woodard — Stickley"

"Bruce Greenwood — Commander Robert Iverson"

"Tcheky Karyo — Serge"

"Richard Jenkins — General Purcell"

"D. J. Qualls — Rat"

"Stanley Tucci — Zimsky"

"Delroy Lindo — Brazzelton"

"Hilary Swank — Beck"

"Aaron Eckhart — Josh"

"Say it with me: "I don't know.""

"The only way out... is in."

"In a year, everyone on Earth is dead."

"Vernon Rich - Colonel Ralph Heffner"

"Jack Kruschen - Salvatore"

"Henry Brandon - Cop at crash"

"Sir Cedric Hardwicke - Narrator"

"Bill Phipps - Wash Perry"

"Paul Frees - Radio reporter"

"Housely Stevenson Jr. - General Mann's aide"

"Lewis Martin - Pastor Dr. Matthew Collins"

"Sandro Giglio - Dr. Bilderbeck"

"Bob Cornthwaite - Dr. Pryor"

"Les Tremayne - General Mann"

"Ann Robinson - Sylvia van Buren"

"Gene Barry - Dr. Clayton Forrester"

"The original invasion!"

"Mighty panorama of Earth-shaking fury as an army from Mars invades!"

"They came to CONQUER the EARTH!"

"A mighty panorama of earth-shaking fury!"

"Amazing! Terrifying! The most savage spectacle of all time!"

"Col. Heffner: [last words before being disintegrated.] Everybody out of here! Everybody out! The Air Force will take care of these babies now! Dr. Forrester, get out of here! Everybody out of here! Everybody out—!"

"Guns, tanks, bombs - they're like toys against them!"

"According to intelligence from other nations, they're working toward some kind of plan. Now, what it may be isn't clear yet, simply because once they begin to move, no more news comes out of that area."

"They'll probably move at dawn."

"We know now we can't beat their machines. We've got to beat them."

"Those shells can't get through to them. They've put up some sort of electromagnetic covering, a protective blister."

"[last lines] The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs which no longer affect us began to kill them. The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth."

"The Martians had calculated their descent upon our Earth with amazing perfection and subtlety. As more of their cylinders came from the mysterious depths of space, their war machines, awesome in their power and complexity, created a wave of fear which swept into all corners of the world. In every country, government officials met in desperate conclave, seeking ways to coordinate their defenses with those of other nations. The government of India, driven from New Delhi, met in a railroad coach, while massive Hindu populations streamed for the imagined safety of the faraway Himalayas. The redoubtable Finnish and Turkish armies, Chinese battalions and Bolivians worked and fought furiously. Every effort against the tremendous power of their other-world antagonists ended in the same frantic rout. As the Martians burned fields and forests, and great cities fell before them, huge populations were driven from their homes. The stream of flight rose swiftly to a torrent. It became a giant stampede without order and without goal. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of humanity. A great silence fell over half of Europe, as all communication was disrupted. When the last wire photo out of Paris reached the French Cabinet, exiled in Strausberg, they hit upon the idea of using super-speed jets as couriers. Stripped of armament and loaded with extra fuel, these planes maintained connections with the Scandinavian countries, North Africa, the United States and especially with England. It was plain the Martians appreciated the strategic significance of the British Isles. The people of Britain met the invaders magnificently, but it was unavailing. As the Martians swept northward toward London, the British Cabinet stayed in session, coordinating every item of information that could be gathered, passing it on to the United Nations in New York. From there, the news was forwarded to Washington. Because here was the only remaining unassailed strategic point."

"[opening lines] No one would have believed, in the middle of the 20th century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Mars, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes, slowly and surely drawing their plans against us. Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries it has been in the last stages of exhaustion. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. The inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligences of which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate. They could not go to Pluto, outermost of all the planets, so cold that its atmosphere lies frozen on its surface. They couldn't go to Neptune or Uranus, twin worlds in eternal night and perpetual cold, both surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere of methane gas and ammonia vapor. The Martians considered Saturn, an attractive world with its many moons and beautiful rings of cosmic dust, but its temperature is close to 270 degrees below zero, and ice lies 15,000 miles deep on its surface. Their nearest world was giant Jupiter, where there are titanic cliffs of lava and ice with hydrogen flaming at the tops, where the atmospheric pressure is terrible - thousands of pounds to the square inch. They couldn't go there. Nor could they go to Mercury, nearest planet to the sun; it has no air, and the temperature at its equator is that of molten lead. Of all the worlds that the intelligences on Mars could see and study, only our own warm Earth was green with vegetation, bright with water, and possessed a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility. It did not occur to mankind that a swift fate might be hanging over us, or that from the blackness of outer space we were being scrutinized and studied – until the time of our nearest approach to the orbit of Mars during a pleasant summer season."

"In the First World War, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days. The Second World War involved every continent on the globe, and men turned to science for new devices of warfare, which reached an unparalleled peak in their capacity for destruction. And now, fought with the terrible weapons of super-science, menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth, comes...The War of the Worlds!"

"This place holds more magic than any palace in the world."

"All of the visual effects in the world, all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can't save a movie that has no clear idea of its mission and no joy in its accomplishment."

"[from trailer; narrated by Tony Jay] Through the ages, the powers of good and evil have been at work amongst us. Through the passages of time, many have attempted to probe and distinguish between myth and fact. What is innocence? What is purity? What is corruption? And what is evil? We still search for the answer. The confrontation between the forces has captured the imaginations of civilization's greatest philosophers, poets and writers. Now, through the cameras of one of the most innovative filmmakers of our generation comes a motion picture to fire the spirit, to excite the senses, to captivate the eye."

"[from trailer; narrated by Tim Curry] There is a balance to the universe. The struggle to maintain that balance is the stuff of legends. For there can be no good without evil, no love without hate. Life needs death. Innocence feeds lust. There can be no heaven without hell, no light without me! I am Darkness!"

"She is of the purest innocence. He is pure evil. He is Darkness."

"I trust you, Lili. I'll always trust you."

"This is such stuff as dreams are made of. This is Legend."