Prince of Darkness (1987)

Victor Wong: Prof. Howard Birack

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Quotes 

• Professor Edward Birack : Suppose what your faith has said is essentially correct. Suppose there is a universal mind controlling everything, a god willing the behavior of every subatomic particle. Well, every particle has an anti-particle, its mirror image, its negative side. Maybe this universal mind resides in the mirror image instead of in our universe as we wanted to believe. Maybe he's anti-god, bringing darkness instead of light

• [Birack teaches a class on quantum physics] 

  Professor Edward Birack : Let's talk about our beliefs, and what we can learn about them. We believe nature is solid, and time a constant. Matter has substance and time a direction. There is truth in flesh and the solid ground. The wind may be invisible, but it's real. Smoke, fire, water, light - they're different! Not as to stone or steel, but they're tangible. And we assume time is narrow because it is as a clock - one second is one second for everyone! Cause precedes effect - fruit rots, water flows downstream. We're born, we age, we die. The reverse NEVER happens... None of this is true! Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level... into ghosts and shadows.

• [Birack teaches a class on quantum physics] 

  Professor Edward Birack : From Job's friends insisting that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists of the 1930's proving to their horror the theorem that not everything can be proved, we've sought to impose order on the universe. But we've discovered something very surprising: while order DOES exist in the universe, it is not at all what we had in mind!

• Brian : [repeated dialogue]  Have you seen Susan?

  Professor Edward Birack : Who?

  Brian : Radiologist. Glasses.

• [talking about the Anti-God] 

  Father Loomis : It's your disbelief that powers him. Your stubborn faith in, in...

  [grasping for words] 

  Father Loomis : *common sense*. It allows his deception. He lives in the smallest parts of it. In the atoms... smaller... invisible... he lives in all of it. In the sum of its parts. We must translate this book. You must prove it scientifically... to convince the outside world.

  Professor Edward Birack : The outside world doesn't want to hear this kind of bullshit. Just keep it locked away. You've already managed that for two thousand years.

  Father Loomis : No prison can hold him now.

• Father Loomis : Why weren't we told the truth?

  Professor Edward Birack : Without the technology to confirm? It would have been another legend.

  Father Loomis : But he was OUR prisoner, not yours!

• Professor Edward Birack : [referring to Satan]  There could be a limit as to what he can do as a volume of liquid.

• Professor Edward Birack : The hardest thing to hear... for any of us... is something we don't agree with