You know, what the folks back home don't understand--the ones who've never left Earth--is just how dangerous space can be. Aside from incidents like this, just the everyday reality of living your days and nights in a big tin can surrounded by a vacuum. I remember my first time on a transport on the Moon-Mars run. I was just a kid, maybe 17. A buddy of mine was messing around and zipping through the halls. And he hid in one of the airlocks. I don't know, I guess he was going to try to scare us or something. I don't know. But just as I got close, he must have hit the wrong button, because the air doors slammed shut, the space doors, opened, and he just flew out into space. And the one thing they never tell you is that you don't die instantly in vacuum. He just hung there, against the black, like a puppet with his strings all tangled up--or like one of those old cartoons where you run off the edge of a cliff and your legs keep going. You could see that he was trying to breathe, but there was nothing! And one thing I remember when they pulled in his body--his eyes were frozen. [long pause] A lot of people make jokes about spacing somebody, about shoving somebody out an airlock. I don't think it's funny. Never will.
“And Now For a Word” · Season 2
In this episode: G'Kar (2), Stephen Franklin (2), John Sheridan (1), Susan Ivanova (1), Londo Mollari (1), Michael Garibaldi (1), Delenn (1)
[ISN reporter Cynthia Torqueman interviews G'Kar about the old Narn-Centauri war.]
My family lived in G'Kamazad, one of the larger cities on Narn. My father..."served" in a Centauri household during the last years of the rebellion. I was barely a pouchling at the time. My mother was ill, unable to escape through the underground, so we all stayed. It was a difficult time. We were striking deep into Centauri resources. Things were tense. One day my father spilled a cup of hot jala on the mistress of the house and...and she had him killed. They took him out, tied his hands together, and hung him from a jalwah tree for three days. I came to him the last night, against my mother's orders, and he looked down at me. He said he was proud, and to go and fight, and be all the things he never was. Then he died. The next morning I ran away and killed my first Centauri.
Why do you think they invaded back then?
Why does any advanced civilization seek to destroy a less-advanced one? Because the land is strategically valuable, because there are resources that can be cultivated and exploited, but most of all...simply because they can. You have experienced much the same on your own world. There are humans for whom the words "never again" carry special meaning. As they do for us.
[various answers to Torqueman's final question: "Given the danger, at the end of the day...is it worth it?"]
Absolutely. Sure, when things get tense out here, we have to be careful. Our search of the Centauri vessels we captured proved that they were bringing in weapons of mass destruction, offloading them outside the station, and sending them on to the front lines. Now that we know that, we can make sure it doesn't happen any more. We learn. It's what humans do.
Misunderstandings aside, yes! I definitely think it's worth it. We must simply work harder to make sure we communicate with one another to prevent this sort of tragic situation from ever happening again! A violent attack by Narn forces is an unacceptable response to a peaceful protest by my government. And with the intervention of Earth, perhaps we can keep them from making a similar mistake in the future.
I don't know any more. I used to think so, but now...
Yes.
Of course it is. For the simple reason that no one else would ever build a place like this. Humans share one unique quality: They build communities. If the Narns or Centauri or any other race built a station like this, it would be used only by their own people. But everywhere humans go, they create communities out of diverse and sometimes hostile populations. It is a great gift, and a terrible responsibility--one that cannot be abandoned.
Well...I guess we'll just have to see...won't we?
All right, Med 2--go, go! Look, if we weren't here right now, half the people in this room would be dead! Now that should be a good enough answer for anyone.
Sure! What, are you kidding? I have a retirement pension to make, you know?
Yes. But not for any of the reasons that you've probably been told. The job of Babylon 5 is not to enforce the peace. It's to create the peace. And this place was built on the assumption that we could work out our problems and build a better future. And that, to me, is the key issue. See, in the last few years, we've stumbled. We stumbled at the death of the President, the war, and on and on. And when you stumble a lot, you...you start looking at your feet. Well, we have to make people...lift their eyes back to the horizon, and see the line of ancestors behind us, saying, "Make my life have meaning." And to our inheritors before us, saying, "Create the world we will live in." I mean, w-we're not just...holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future. That's what Babylon 5 is all about.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Babylon 5 pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.