- Noah Longstreet: [to his sister just back from her skiing honeymoon] Did you remember to keep your knees together and your apparatus in?
- Professor Charles Rankin: The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world envy and hatred, conspired against, set upon by inferior peoples, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing, not the German. We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain, but we learned from our own casualty list the price of looking the other way. Men of truth everwhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German. No! He still follows his warrior gods marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the firey sword of Siegfried, and he knows subterranean meeting places that you don't believe in. The German's dream world comes alive when he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banners of the Teutonic knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah, but for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. No, he's... another Barbarossa... another Hitler.
- Mary Longstreet: Why wasn't it I... Franz Kindler? Kill me. Kill me, I want you to. I couldn't face life knowing what I've been to you and what I've done to Noah. But when you kill me, don't put your hands on me!
- [Picks up a fireplace poker]
- Mary Longstreet: Here! Use this!
- Professor Charles Rankin: Who would think to look for the notorious Franz Kindler in the sacred precincts of the Harper School, surrounded by the sons of America's first families? And I'll stay hidden... till the day when we strike again.
- Konrad Meinike: Franz! There will be another war?
- Professor Charles Rankin: Of course.
- [after Meineke's body is dug up]
- Mr. Potter: I knew darn well it was the same feller. 'Course, he's changed some. Uh, being buried in the earth does it.
- Dr. Charles Rankin/Franz Kindler: They searched the woods. I watched them, here, like God looking at little ants.
- Mr. Wilson: In prison, in Czechoslovakia, a war criminal was awaiting execution. This was Konrad Meinike, one time executive officer for Franz Kindler. He was an obscenity on the face of the earth. The stench of burning flesh was in his clothes.
- Mary Longstreet: Hello, father. Has anybody seen my brand new husband?
- Judge Longstreet: Don't tell me he's deserted you already.
- Professor Charles Rankin: Murder can be a chain, Mary, one link leading to another until it circles your neck. Red was digging at the grave of the man I killed. Yes, your little man.
- Mary Longstreet: You killed him?
- Professor Charles Rankin: With these hands. The same hands that have held you close to me.
- Mr. Wilson: Look out the window. Look!
- Professor Charles Rankin: Well, that's... that's an old trick, Mr. Wilson, a very poor trick.
- Mr. Wilson: Tricks. That's all you know is tricks. I don't need any tricks! And no matter what happens to me, tricks won't do YOU any good. You're finished, Herr Franz Kindler.
- Mary Longstreet: Oh Charles, I can't imagine you're advocating a Carthaginian peace.
- Professor Charles Rankin: Well, as a historian, I must remind you that the world hasn't had much trouble from Carthage in the past 2000 years.
- Mr. Potter: [Talking about his small town general store] All your needs are on our shelves. Just look around, help yourselves.
- Professor Charles Rankin: I too am different, comrade. I - you know how I gathered and destroyed every single item in Germany and Poland that might have served as a clue to my identity; well, guess what I'll be doing at six o'clock tonight? Standing before a minister of the gospel with a woman's hand in mine, the daughter of a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, a famous Liberal. The girl is even good to look at. Yes, the camouflage is perfect.
- Professor Charles Rankin: The basic principals of equality and freedom never have and never will take root in Germany. The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue: "All men are created equal" "Liberté, égalité, fraternité". But, in German?
- [shakes his head no]
- Mr. Wilson: There's no escape. You had a world and it closed in on you until there was only Harper. That closed in on you and there was only this room! And this room too is closing in on you.
- Professor Charles Rankin: It's not true the things they say I did. It was all their idea. I followed orders.
- Mr. Wilson: You gave the orders.
- Professor Charles Rankin: As a rule, men leave their wives because they don't love them; but, I must leave you because - I do.
- Professor Charles Rankin: Oh Mary, I - I should have gone away and lost myself in a world where he could never find me. But - I loved you. I was weak.
- Mr. Wilson: I'm on the Allied commission for the punishment of war criminals. Its my job to bring escaped Nazis to justice. It's that job that brought me to Harper.
- Mary Longstreet: Surely, you don't think - Mr. Wilson, I've never - I've never so much as even seen a Nazi.
- Mr. Wilson: Well, you might without you realizing it. They look like other people and - act like other people, when it's to their benefit.
- Mary Longstreet: Why do you want me to look at these horrors?
- Mr. Wilson: All this you're seeing - it's all the product of one mind. The mind of a man named: Franz Kindler.
- Mary Longstreet: Franz Kindler?
- Mr. Wilson: Yes, he was the most brilliant of the younger minds from the Nazi party. It was Kindler who conceived the theory of genocide, mass depopulation of conquered countries, so, that, regardless of who won the war, Germany would emerge the strongest nation in Western Europe - biologically speaking. Unlike Goebbels, Himmler, and the rest of them, Kindler had a passion for anonymity. The newspapers carried no picture of him. Oh, no, and just before he disappeared he destroyed every evidence that might link him to his past - down to the last fingerprint. There's no clue to the identify of Franz Kindler; except one little thing. He has a hobby that almost amounts to a mania: clocks.
- Mr. Wilson: Forepaw's muddy. No mud on hind. Dry leaves mixed with the mud. Red must have been digging somewhere in the woods.
- Noah Longstreet: Have you any idea what for, Mr. Wilson?
- Mr. Wilson: A body, I think. Meinike's.
- Mr. Wilson: I'm not interested in proving that he isn't Charles Rankin. I'm only interested in proving that he's Franz Kindler.
- Woman at Party 2: Mr. Rankin, I wish you'd let that clock alone. Harper was a nice quiet place until it started banging.
- Mrs. Rand: You know what you are, Mr. Rankin? You're the absent minded professor.
- [laughs]
- Professor Charles Rankin: I put him in the cellar.
- Mary Longstreet: Oh, darling, no wonder he's howling. He's never been locked up in his entire life.
- Professor Charles Rankin: If he is to live with us, he must be trained. At night he will sleep in the cellar. In the daytime he'll be kept on a leash.
- Mary Longstreet: Charles, I don't believe in dogs being treated like prisoners. Red's my dog.
- Professor Charles Rankin: Please, Mary - I know what's best.
- Professor Charles Rankin: Mary, in failing to speak, you've become part of the crime.
- Mary Longstreet: But, I'm already a part of it; because, I'm a part of you.
- [kiss]
- Professor Charles Rankin: But, you shudder at the first touch of my hands as though it was the touch of death.
- Mary Longstreet: It - was nerves?
- Woman at Party 1: Mr. Rankin, I wish you'd let that clock alone. Harper was a nice quiet place until it started banging.
- Woman at Party 1: Do you know you're our number 1 suspect in our murder case?
- Mr. Wilson: Oh?
- Woman at Party 1: So far, you're the only suspect.