- The Boss: Who are you, I said!
- John Cabal: The law. Law and sanity.
- The Boss: I'm the law here!
- John Cabal: I said law and sanity.
- Roxana: I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations.
- Oswald Cabal: There! There they go. That faint beam of light.
- Raymond Passworthy: I feel that what we've done is monstrous.
- Oswald Cabal: What they've done is magnificent.
- Raymond Passworthy: Will they come back?
- Oswald Cabal: Yes, and go again and again, until a landing is made and the moon is conquered. This is only a beginning.
- Raymond Passworthy: And if they don't come back? My son and your daughter. What of that, Cabal?
- Oswald Cabal: Then presently, others will go.
- Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there never to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?
- Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man. Too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him... and at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of Space, and all the mysteries of Time, still he will be beginning.
- Raymond Passworthy: But we're such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little... little animals.
- Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And if we're no more than animals, then we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that - all the Universe or nothing! Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?
- The Boss: This is an independent sovereign state.
- John Cabal: Yes, we must talk about that.
- The Boss: We don't discuss it.
- John Cabal: We don't approve of independent sovereign states.
- The Boss: You don't approve...?
- John Cabal: We mean to stop them.
- The Boss: That's war!
- John Cabal: If you will.
- The Boss: All right, I think we know how we stand. Burton, take this man. If he gives you any trouble, club him. You hear that, Mr. Wings Over Your Wits?
- John Cabal: My friends know my whereabouts. If I don't come back, they'll send a force to find me.
- The Boss: Perhaps they won't find you.
- John Cabal: They'll find you.
- The Boss: They'll find me ready.
- The Airman: I dropped the gas on her. Maybe I killed her mother and father. Maybe I killed her whole family. And the I give up my mask to save her. That's funny. That's a joke.
- The Boss: Our dear old world, our dear old land. There are some among us that dare to run down our land. Out isn't this, it isn't that, it isn't what it used to be. We haven't got chemists. Well, who wants chemists? They don't print books any more. Who wants books to muddle their thoughts and ideas? We can't travel any more. Well, isn't our land good enough for us!
- Theotocopulos: Is it any better a world than it used to be? I rebel against this progress. What has this Progress, this World civilisation done for us? Machines and marvels. They've built these great cities of theirs, yes. They've prolonged life, yes. They've conquered nature, they say, and made a great white world. Is it any jollier than the world used to be in the good old days, when life was short and hot and merry and the devil took the hindmost?
- The Boss: The State's your mother, your father, the totality of your interests. No discipline can be too severe for the man who denies that by word or deed.