- Professor Bernard Quatermass: The will to survive... it's an odd phenomenon. Roney, if we found out earth was doomed - say, by climatic changes - what would we do about it?
- Dr. Mathew Roney: Nothing. Just go on squabbling as usual.
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: Yes, but if we weren't men?
- Col. Breen: Mars is dead, nothing there but a few scraps of lichen.
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: Five million years ago it may have been very different. Suppose at that time there were living beings on it with techniques that let them visit the Earth at a time when the most highly evolved creatures here, our own ancestors, were only a type of Pliocene ape.
- Minister of Defense: Go on.
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: They may have wanted to found another colony, when their own world was doomed, but couldn't endure our atmosphere, so they experimented.
- Minister of Defense: Oh, and the insects were responsible?
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: There is clearly some connection. My guess is that those were ape mutations being brought back for release on Earth.
- Col. Breen: And you really believe this was possible? That apes were systematically taken from this planet to another and...
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: Altered, by selective breeding, atomic surgery, methods we can't guess, and with new faculties instilled in them, high intelligence, perhaps something else.
- Howell: In effect, a colonization.
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: It would be a way of possessing the Earth. Only a colony by proxy, but better than leaving nothing at all behind.
- Howell: Surely it had to be carried out on a hugh scale.
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: Yes, if I'm right, if I'm right, we've come on a single instance, probably an accident, a landing that went wrong and they all died. The Thames valley was swamp then.
- Minister of Defense: You realize what you are implying? That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects.
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: I suppose I am.
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: These shapes, suggests some sort of... apparatus... instruments...
- Col. Breen: Your imagination is running wild
- Professor Bernard Quatermass: Isn't yours?
- Col. Breen: What?
- Sladden: [Preparing his drill] I did steel armour plating within six inches thick. Swish - just like that. Oh, it was legal. A bloke got shut in a strong room. But I got him out. It was a secret job like this one.
- Col. Breen: Then I'm glad you don't talk about it.
- Minister of Defense: You realise what you're implying? That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects?