The Twilight Zone (1959) Season 4 quotes

Rod Serling

Picture of the spaceship E-89, cruising above the thirteenth planet of star system fifty-one, the year 1997. In a little while, supposedly, the ship will be landed and specimens taken: vegetable, mineral and, if any, animal. These will be brought back to overpopulated Earth, where technicians will evaluate them and, if everything is satisfactory, stamp their findings with the word "habitable" and open up yet another planet for colonization. These are the things that are supposed to happen.

Rod Serling

Picture of the crew of the spaceship E-89: Captain Ross, Lieutenant Mason, Lieutenant Carter. Three men who have just reached a place which is as far from home as they will ever be. Three men who, in a matter of minutes, will be plunged into the darkest nightmare reaches of the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

Picture of a man who will not see anything he does not choose to see--including his own death. A man of such indomitable will that even the two men beneath his command are not allowed to see the truth; which truth is, that they are no longer among the living, that the movements they make and the words they speak have all been made and spoken countless times before--and will be made and spoken countless times again, perhaps even unto eternity. Picture of a latter-day Flying Dutchman, sailing into the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

The Twilight Zone has existed in many lands, in many times. It has its roots in history, in something that happened long, long ago and got told about and handed down from one generation of folk to the other. In the telling the story gets added to and embroidered on, so that what might have happened in the time of the Druids is told as if it took place yesterday in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Such stories are best told by an elderly grandfather on a cold winter's night by the fireside--in the southern hills of the Twilight Zone.

What did you pay her with?

My flesh and blood... my soul... my brain... my dreams... my hands.

Rod Serling

To the average person, a museum is a place of knowledge, a place of beauty and truth and wonder. Some people come to study, others to contemplate, others to look for the sheer joy of looking. Charley Parkes has his own reasons. He comes to the museum to get away from the world. It isn't really the sixty-cent cafeteria meal that has drawn him here every day. It's the fact that here in these strange, cool halls, he can be alone for a little while, really and truly alone. Anyway, that's how it was before he got lost, and wandered into the Twilight Zone.

[after his return from the mental institution] Did they hurt you, Charley?

Well, I heard they were gonna use shock therapy, and I hear that hurts quite a bit, but they decided not to when I got well.

Rod Serling

They never found Charley Parkes, because the guard didn't tell them what he saw in the glass case. He knew what they'd say, and he knew they'd be right too, because seeing is not always believing. Especially if what you see happens to be an odd corner of the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

Take away a man's dream, fill him with whiskey and despair, send him to a lonely bridge, let him stand there all by himself looking down at the black water, and try to imagine the thoughts that are in his mind. You can't, I can't. But there's someone who can - and that someone is seated next to Douglas Winter right now. The car is headed back toward town, but its real destination is the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

Exit the infernal machine, and with it his satanic majesty, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, otherwise known as Mr. Smith. He's gone, but not for good. That wouldn't be like him. He's gone for bad. And he might be back, with another ticket to the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the twentieth century. He puts to a test a complicated theorum of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further--or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present--one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as the Twilight Zone.

[at dinner] ...So what are your world views, Driscoll?

I don't have any, Mr. Hanford.

Of course you do, man. We ALL do! Like all this nonsense about giving the Indians land. What we need are twenty General Custers and a hundred thousand men! What we should have done is swept across the prairie, destroying every redskin that stood before us. And then we should have planted the American flag deep, high, and proud!

I think the country is tired of fighting, Mr. Hanford. I think we were bled dry by the Indian Wars. I think anything we can accomplish peacefully, with treaties, we should...so long as it saves lives.

Now, I trust this pap isn't what you spoon-feed your students. Treaties, indeed! Peace, indeed! Why, the virility of a nation is in direct proportion to its military prowess. I live for the day when this country SWEEPS AWAY...

You some kind of a pacifist, Driscoll?

No, just some sick idiot who's seen too many boys die because of too many men who fight their battles at dining room tables...and who probably wouldn't last so long as twenty-five seconds in a REAL skirmish, if they WERE thrust into it.

I take offense at that remark, Mr. Driscoll!

And I take offense at armchair warriors like yourself...who clearly don't know what a shrapnel, or a bullet, or a saber wound feels like...who've never smelled death after three days on a sun-drenched battlefield...who've never seen the look on a man's face when he realizes he's lost a limb or two, and his blood is seeping out. Mr. Hanford, you have a great enthusiasm for planting flags deep, high, and proud. But you don't have a nodding acquaintance with what it's like for families to bury their sons in the same soil!

I'll not sit here and take talk like that!

Of course you won't. You'll return to your bank, and it'll be business as usual until dinner tomorrow night...when you'll deliver another of your tirades about building up nations founded on ever-growing cemeteries. Well, if this nation shares your views -- as I dread it just might -- then you're in for some gratifying times, Mr. Hanford. There'll be many graveyards to fill, both American and foreign, because this country will get virile as the devil. We'll show how red our blood is, because we'll spill it. And we'll show how red our fellow nations' blood is, because we'll spill that also. Not that it's probable you yourself will need to spill any; chances are you won't even be there to see what I speak of come to pass. I'm sure you pity yourself for those two likelihoods; I, on the other hand, envy you for them.

Rod Serling

Incident on a July afternoon, 1881. A man named Driscoll who came and went and, in the process, learned a simple lesson, perhaps best said by a poet named Lathbury, who wrote, 'Children of yesterday, heirs of tomorrow, what are you wearing? Labor and sorrow? Look to your looms again, faster and faster fly the great shuttles prepared by the master. Life's in the loom, room for it--room!' Tonight's tale of clocks and calendars--in the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

In the vernacular of space, this is T minus one hour, sixty minutes before a human being named Major Robert Gaines is lifted off from the Mother Earth and rocketed into the sky, farther and longer than any man ahead of him. Call this one of the first faltering steps of man to sever the umbilical cord of gravity and stretch out a fingertip toward an unknown. Shortly, we'll join this astronaut named Gaines and embark on an adventure, because the environs overhead - the stars, the sky, the infinite space - are all part of a vast question mark known as the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

Major Robert Gaines, a latter-day voyager just returned from an adventure. Submitted to you without any recommendation as to belief or disbelief. You can accept or reject; you pays your money and you takes your choice. But credulous or incredulous, don't bother to ask anyone for proof that it could happen. The obligation is a reverse challenge: prove that it couldn't. This happens to be... the Twilight Zone.