Dr. Manhattan / Jonathan Osterman – Character Quotes

Without condoning or condemning. I understand.

I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man.

I am tired of Earth. These people. I'm tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives. They claim their labors are to build a heaven...yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman.

Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring...like oxygen turning into gold. I've longed to witness such an event, and yet I neglect that in human coupling millions upon millions of cells compete to create life...for generation after generation...until finally, your mother loves a man Edward Blake, the Comedian, a man she has every reason to hate...and out of that contradiction, against unfathomable odds...it's you. Only you. That emerged. To distill so specific a form... from all that chaos is like turning air into gold. A miracle.

— Blake, she was pregnant. You gunned her down.
— Yeah, that's right. Pregnant woman. Gunned her down. Bang. And y'know what? You watched me. You could've changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! (...) You really don't give a damn about human beings, do you.

In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon.

We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

Miracles, by their definition, are meaningless. Only what can happen does happen.

My father was a watchmaker. He abandoned it when Einstein discovered that time is relative.