The Outer Limits Season 1 quotes

[closing narration] An experiment too soon, too swift. And yet may we not still hope to discover a method by which within one generation, the whole human race could be rendered intelligent, beyond hatred, or revenge, or the desire for power? Is that not, after all, the ultimate goal of evolution?

[opening narration] Here, in the bright, clustered loneliness of the billion, billion stars, loneliness can be an exciting, voluntary thing, unlike the loneliness Man suffers on Earth. Here, deep in the starry nowhere, a man can be as one with space and time; preoccupied, yet not indifferent; anxious and yet at peace. His name is Joseph Reardon. He is, in this present year, thirty years old. This is the first time he has made this journey alone…

[Decrying the present condition of mankind] But man was too busy, too busy going to the moon, too busy clubbing his brothers over the head with its new found toy, the atom, to anticipate and resist the parasite that was to suck out his right to immortality.

[closing narration] It is said that if you move a single pebble on the beach, you set up a different pattern and everything in the world is changed. It can also be said that love can change the future, if it is deep enough, true enough and selfless enough. It can prevent a war, prohibit a plague, keep the whole world... whole.

[opening narration] In this room, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, security personnel at the Defense Department's Cypress Hills Research Center keep constant watch on its scientists through O.B.I.T., a mysterious electronic device whose very existence was carefully kept from the public at large. And so it would have remained, but for the facts you are about to witness…

The machines are everywhere! Oh you'll find them all, you're a zealous people. And you'll make a great show of smashing a few of them, but for every one you destroy hundreds of others will be built. And they will demoralize you! Breaks your spirits! Create such rivets and tensions in your society that no one will be able to repair them! Oh, your a savage, despairing planet and when we come here to live you friendless, demoralized, flotsam will fall without even a single shot being fired. Senator, enjoy the few years left you, there is no answer...Your all the same. Dark persuasion! You demand, insist on knowing every private thought and hunger of everyone. Your families, your neighbors. Everyone! But, yourselves.

[closing narration] Agents of the Justice Department are rounding up the machines now. But these machines, these inventions of another planet, have been cunningly conceived to prey on our most mortal weakness. In the last analysis, dear friends, whether O.B.I.T. lives up to its name or not will depend on you.

[opening narration] In northern Greenland, the mountains stand like a wall along Victoria Channel, whose straight course marks the line of the great Baffin Fault. Until recently, not even the Eskimos ventured into this arctic waste; but, today, as in other lonely places of the world, the land is dominated by those instruments of detection which stand as a grim reminder of Man's fear of Man. This is Point TABU, a name given this predominantly underground base by a young officer who explained that the letters in TABU stood for 'Total Abandonment of Better Understanding'. Some two hundred men and a few women make this their permanent residence. Their task is to maintain a constant alert against enemy attack, and be prepared to respond to it, devastatingly.

[to Dr. James Hamilton] We live in a world of cowards, Dr. Hamilton. Every man is afraid of his brother, and most men try to hide from that awful fact. Even here, the men are afraid to see the evil that is here on this base. And they are responsible for it.

[closing narration] A weapon? No, only an instrument: neither good nor evil until men put it to use. And then like so many of man's inventions, it can be used either to save lives or destroy them, to make men sane or to drive them mad, to increase human understanding or to betray it. But it will be men that make the choice. By itself the instrument is nothing until you add the human factor.

[opening narration] Rocks: silent, inanimate objects torn from the Earth's ancient crust. Yielding up to man over the long centuries all that is in know of the planet on which we live withholding from man forever their veiled secrets of the nature of matter and cosmic catastrophe, the secrets of other worlds in the vastness of the universe, of other forms of life, of strange organisms beyond the imagination of man.

[closing narration] Two black crystalline rocks: unclassifiable. Objects on the border between the living and the nonliving. A reminder of the thin line that separates the animate from the inanimate. Something to ponder on. Something to stay the hand when it reaches out innocently for the whitened pebble, the veined stone, the dead unmoving rocks of our planet.

[opening narration] A war between worlds has long been dreaded. Throughout recent history, Man, convinced that life on other planets would be as anxious and belligerent as life on his own, has gravely predicted that some dreadful form of combat would inevitably take place between our world and that of someone else. And Man was right. To the eternal credit of the peoples of this planet Earth, history shall be able to proclaim loudly and justly that in this war between Unified Earth and the planet Ebon, Ebon struck first. Ebon: Its form of life unknown, its way of life unpredictable. To the fighting troops of Earth, a black question mark at the end of a dark, foreboding journey.

There's no leniency for a traitor. None at all. He earned the death penalty all by himself. There's no reason why we should handle Major Jong any differently here than if he were down on Earth. I told you all before we were captured, the only laws we would have here were those we brought with us. We need those laws. Even the questionable ones, even the painful ones. We need them. They remind us that we were civilized enough to make them in the first place.

Or perhaps to remind us that we are not as civilized as we should be.

[closing narration] The exploration of human behavior under simulated conditions of stress is a commonplace component of the machinery called war. So long as Man anticipates and prepares for combat, be it with neighboring nations or with our neighbors in space, these unreal games must be played, and there are only real men to play them. According to established military procedure, the results of the Ebon maneuvers will be recorded in books and fed into computers for the edification and enlightenment of all the strategists of the future. Perhaps they will learn something.