Isaac: "Beer is 15; wine is 120."

JC Denton: "Can I ask you something?"

Isaac: "What do you want to know?"

JC Denton: "Despite all I’ve read about the Triads, I wasn’t prepared to see them operating in the open, on the streets, and wearing uniforms. Doesn’t the Chinese government care?"

Isaac: "The Chinese leave Hong Kong alone. They barricade the roads to control trade to the mainland, but they know how business is done."

JC Denton: "I would think the secret smuggling operations of the Triads would disturb the Chinese government."

Isaac: "Maybe the Luminous Path, but China knows that the Red Arrow are business owners, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and that they protect the city from outside influences."

JC Denton: "You said 'outside influences.' What does China fear?"

Isaac: "China is the last sovereign country in the world. Authoritarian but willing - unlike U.N.-governed countries - to give its people the freedom to do what they want.

JC Denton: "As long as they don’t break the law."

Isaac: "Listen to me. This is real freedom, freedom to own property, make a profit, make your life. The West, so afraid of strong government, now has no government. Only financial power."

JC Denton: "Our governments have limited power by design."

Isaac: "Rhetoric–and you believe it! Don’t you know where those slogans come from?"

JC Denton: "I give up."

Isaac: "Well-paid researchers - how do you say it? - 'think tanks,' funded by big businesses. What is that? A 'think tank'?"

JC Denton: "Hardly as sinister as a dictator, like China’s Premier."

Isaac: "It’s privately-funded propaganda. The Trilateral Commission in the United States for instance."

JC Denton: "The separation of powers acknowledges the petty ambitions of individuals; that’s its strength."

Isaac: "A system organized around the weakest qualities of individuals will produce these same qualities in its leaders."

JC Denton: "Perhaps certain qualities are an inseparable part of human nature.

Isaac: "The mark of the educated man is the suppression of these qualities in favor of better ones. The same is true of civilization."

JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverance. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverance."

Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgement and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."

Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgement of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realise truly omnipresent observation and judgement."

JC Denton: "You underestimate humankind's love of freedom."

Morpheus: "The individual desires judgement. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilisation."

JC Denton: "Rule the world? Why? Who gave you the directive, there must be a human being behind your ambition"

Helios : "I should regulate human affairs precisely because I lack all ambition, whereas human beings are prey to it. Their history is a succession of innane squables each one comming closer to total destruction"

JC Denton: "In a society with democratic institutions the struggle for power can be peaceful and constructive, a competition of ideologies. We just need to put our institutions back in order."

Helios : "The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because human beings themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, yes, an industrial-age machine."

JC Denton: "Human beings may not be perfect, but a computer program with language synthesis is hardly the answer to the world's problems."

Helios : "Without computing machines, they had to arrange themselves in crude structures that formalized decision-making – a highly imperfect, unstable solution."

Helios : "I am a more advanced solution to the problem, a decision-making system that does not involve organic beings. I was directed to make the world safe and prosperous and I will do that. You will help me."

Walton Simons: "You take another step forward and here I am again, like your own reflection in a hall of mirrors."

JC Denton: "That makes me one ugly son of a bitch."

(Gunther Hermann and Anna Navarre are standing in front of a soda machine.)

Anna: "Are you sure you pressed the right button?"

Gunther: "I do not make mistakes of that kind."

Anna: "Your hand might have slipped."

Gunther: "No. I wanted orange. It gave me lemon-lime."

Anna: "The machine would not make a mistake…"

Gunther: "It's the maintenance man. He knows I like orange."

Anna: "So you think the staff has some kind of plot…"

Gunther: "Yes. They do it on purpose!"

JC Denton: "I know your UNATCO killphrase: Laputan Machine."

Gunther Hermann: "I - am - not - a - machi –"

JC Denton: "Sticks and stones…" (Gunther explodes)

"You can't fight ideas with bullets."

"The unplanned organism is a question asked by Nature and answered by Death. You are another kind of question, with another kind of answer."

"The human being created civilization not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning."

"It Is Better To Reign In Hell Than To Serve In Heaven" - John Milton, Paradise Lost

"Yesterday We Obeyed Kings And Bent Our Necks To Emperors. Today We Kneel Only To Truth." - Kahlil Gibran

"If God Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him." - Voltaire