- Bruce Wayne: We're criminals, Alfred. We've always been criminals. Nothing's changed.
- Alfred: Oh, yes it has, sir. Everything's changed. Men fall from the sky, the gods hurl thunderbolts, innocents die. That's how it starts, sir. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men... cruel.
- Batman: I bet your parents taught you that you mean something, that you're here for a reason. My parents taught me a different lesson, dying in the gutter for no reason at all... They taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to.
- Clark Kent: Civil liberties are being trampled on in your city; good people living in fear.
- Bruce Wayne: Don't believe everything you hear, son.
- Clark Kent: I've seen it, Mr. Wayne. He thinks he's above the law.
- Bruce Wayne: The Daily Planet criticizing those who think they're above the law is a little hypocritical, wouldn't you say? Considering every time your hero saves a cat out of a tree, you write a puff piece editorial about an alien who, if he wanted to, could burn the whole place down. There wouldn't be a damn thing we can do to stop it.
- Clark Kent: Most of the world doesn't share your opinion, Mr. Wayne.
- Bruce Wayne: Maybe it's that Gotham City and me... we just have a bad history with freaks dressed like clowns.
- Perry White: So. I logged into your Dropbox to find a copy. There's copy all right. But nothing about football. Nothing about, uh, the friends of Metropolis Library, just the goddamn Bat thing I told you not to pursue.
- Clark Kent: If the police won't help, the press has to do the right thing.
- Perry White: You don't get to decide what the right thing is.
- Clark Kent: When the Planet was founded, it stood for something, Perry.
- Perry White: And so could you if it was 1938, but it's not 1938. WPA ain't hiring no more. Apples don't cost a nickel. Not in here, not out there. You drop this thing! Nobody cares about Clark Kent talking on the Batman.
- Lex Luthor: [looks at a picture of angels vs demons] That should be upside down. We know better now, don't we? Devils don't come from hell beneath us. No, they come from the sky.
- Bruce Wayne: Still working? You're getting slow in your old age, Alfred.
- Alfred: It comes to us all, Master Wayne. Even you've got too old to die young, though not for lack of trying.
- Alfred: You're gonna go to war?
- Bruce Wayne: That son of a bitch brought the war to us two years ago. Jesus, Alfred, count the dead... thousands of people. What's next? Millions? He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there's even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty... and we have to destroy him.
- Alfred: But he is not our enemy!
- Bruce Wayne: Not today. Twenty years in Gotham, Alfred; we've seen what promises are worth. How many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?
- Superman: You think I'll fight him for you?
- Lex Luthor: Mm, yes, I do. I think you will fight, fight, fight for that special lady in your life!
- Superman: She's safe on the ground. How about you?
- Lex Luthor: Close, but I am not talking about Lois. No. Every boy's special lady is his mother... Martha, Martha, Martha... Now, the mother of a flying demon must be a witch. The punishment for witches, what is that? That's right. Death by fire.
- Senator Finch: The world has been so caught up with what Superman can do that no one has asked what he should do.
- Batman: You're not brave... men are brave. You say that you want to help people, but you can't feel their pain... their mortality... It's time you learn what it means to be a man.
- Bruce Wayne: You don't know me, but I've known a few women like you.
- Diana Prince: Oh, I don't think you've ever known a woman like me.
- The Flash: Bruce! Listen to me now! It's Lois! Lois Lane! She's the key! Am I too soon? I'm too soon! You were right about him! You've always been right about him! Fear him! Find us, Bruce! You have to find us!
- Alfred: Master Wayne, since the age of seven you've been into the art of deception like Mozart to the harpsichord, but you've never been too hot at lying to me.
- Jonathan Kent: It's somethin', innit? One minute in Kansas livin' on a pancake so we come to the mountains. All downhill from here; down to the floodplain, arm at the bottom of the world. I remember one season the water came bad. I couldn't've been twelve. Dad had out the shovels and we went at it all night. We worked 'til I think I fainted, but we managed to stop the water. We saved the farm. Your grandma baked me a cake, said I was a hero. Later that day we found out we blocked the water alright - we sent it upstream. A whole Lange farm washed away. While I ate my hero cake, their horses were drowning. I used to hear them wailing in my sleep.
- Clark Kent: Did the nightmares ever stop?
- Jonathan Kent: Yeah. When I met your mother. She gave me faith that there's good in this world. She was my world. I miss you, Son.
- Clark Kent: I miss you too, Dad.
- [first lines]
- Batman: There was a time above... a time before... there were perfect things... diamond absolutes. But things fall... things on earth. And what falls... is fallen. In the dream, it took me to the light. A beautiful lie.
- Lois Lane: You're psychotic.
- Lex Luthor: That is a three syllable word for any thought too big for little minds.
- Martha Kent: Be their hero, Clark. Be their angel, be their monument, be anything they need you to be... or be none of it. You don't owe this world a thing. You never did.
- Lex Luthor: See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Jo, 'cause God is tribal. God takes sides. No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from Daddy's fist and abominations. I figured out way back if God is all-powerful, He cannot be all good. And if He is all good, then He cannot be all-powerful. And neither can you be.
- Alfred: You know you can't win this. It's suicide.
- Bruce Wayne: I'm older now than my father ever was. This may be the only thing I do that matters.
- Alfred: Twenty years of fighting criminals amounts to nothing?
- Bruce Wayne: Criminals are like weeds, Alfred; pull one up, another grows in its place. This is about the future of the world. This is my legacy.
- Bruce Wayne: Excuse me, miss. The other night you took something that doesn't belong to you. Stealing's not polite.
- Diana Prince: Is it stealing if you steal from another thief?
- Lex Luthor: Boys! Mm, Bruce Wayne meets Clark Kent. Ah, I love it! I love bringing people together! How are we?
- [shakes Bruce's hand]
- Bruce Wayne: Lex.
- Lex Luthor: Hello. Good.
- [turns to Clark]
- Lex Luthor: Hi, hello.
- [shakes Clark's hand]
- Lex Luthor: Lex. It is a pleasure... Ow! Wow, that is a good grip! You should not pick a fight with this person.
- Bruce Wayne: All the circuses back east, burying an empty box.
- Diana Prince: They don't know how to honor him, except as a soldier.
- Bruce Wayne: I've failed him... in life. I won't fail him in death. Help me find the others like you.
- Diana Prince: Perhaps they don't want to be found.
- Bruce Wayne: They will. And they'll fight. We have to stand together.
- Diana Prince: A hundred years ago I walked away from mankind, from a century of horrors. Man made a world where standing together is impossible.
- Bruce Wayne: Men are still good. We fight. We kill. We betray one another. But we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.
- [scene of funeral ceremony and graffiti: IF YOU SEEK HIS MONUMENT LOOK AROUND YOU]
- Diana Prince: The others like me. Why did you say they'll have to fight?
- Bruce Wayne: Just a feeling.
- Diana Prince: A hundred years ago I walked away from mankind; from a century of horrors... Men made a world where standing together is impossible.
- Bruce Wayne: Men are still good. We fight, we kill, we betray one another, but we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.
- Clark Kent: It's like a one-man reign of terror. This bat vigilante has been consistently targeting the port and the adjacent projects and tenements. And, far as I can tell, the cops are actually helping him.
- Perry White: "Crime Wave in Gotham." Other breaking news: "Water, Wet." Did you file the football yet?
- Clark Kent: Why aren't we covering this? Poor people don't buy papers?
- Perry White: People don't buy papers, period, Kent.
- Clark Kent: Perry, when you assign a story, you're making a choice about who matters. And who's worth it.
- Perry White: Good morning, Smallville. The American conscience died with Robert, Martin, and John.
- Superman: All this time I've been living my life the way my father saw it. Righting wrongs for a ghost, thinking I'm here to do good. Superman was never real. Just the dream of a farmer from Kansas.
- Lois Lane: That farmer's dream is all some people have. It's all that gives them hope.
- [touches the S shield]
- Lois Lane: This means something.
- Superman: It did on my world. My world doesn't exist anymore.
- Diana Prince: [to Bruce Wayne] You know, it's true what they say about little boys: born with no natural inclination to share.
- Clark Kent: Mr. Wayne! Clark Kent, Daily Planet.
- Bruce Wayne: Oh, my foundation's already issued a statement in support of, uh, books.
- Clark Kent: I'm sorry?
- Bruce Wayne: [watching Diana Prince walk away] Wow. Pretty girl, bad habit. Don't quote me, alright?
- Jon Stewart: So apparently Superman doesn't want us to think of him as American anymore. And really, why would we? Aside from the red and blue costume. And, I don't know, the fact that he has one-third of the USA's initials on his chest. I assume the only reason he's not wearing the Declaration of Independence as a cape is... He thinks it's too on-the-nose.
- Lex Luthor: And now you will fly to him, and you will battle him to the death. Black and blue. Fight night. The greatest gladiator match in the history of the world: God versus man; day versus night; Son of Krypton versus Bat of Gotham!
- Diana Prince: The others like me... Why did you say they'll have to fight?
- Bruce Wayne: Just a feeling.
- Lex Luthor: You don't need to use a silver bullet. But if you forge one, you don't need to depend on the kindness of monsters.
- Batman: Whatever you do, wherever you go, I will be watching you.
- Lex Luthor: But the bell's already been rung.
- Superman: Luthor. He wanted your life for her's. She's losing time.
- Lois Lane: The scout ship seems to be drawing power from the city. It's gotta be Lex.
- Batman: They need you at that ship. I'll find her.
- Superman: My mother needs me.
- Batman: [stops him] Wait. I'll make you a promise: Martha won't die tonight.
- Alfred: [looking at an empty wine bottle] I hope the next generation of Waynes won't inherit an empty wine cellar. Not that there's likely to be a next generation...
- Bruce Wayne: I can't stay down here, Alfred.
- Alfred: Go upstairs and socialize. Some young lady from Metropolis will make you honest.
- [to self]
- Alfred: In your dreams, Alfred...
- Wonder Woman: This thing, this creature, seems to feed on energy.
- Superman: This thing is from another world. My world.
- Wonder Woman: I've killed things from other worlds before.
- Superman: [to Batman] Is she with you?
- Batman: I thought she was with you.
- Lex Luthor: An ancient Kryptonian deformity; blood of my blood, born to destroy you!... Your Doomsday.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson: We're talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe. And you go back to Copernicus where he restored the sun in the center of the known universe, displacing Earth. And you get to Darwinian evolution and you find out we're not special on this earth. We're just one among other lifeforms. And now we learn that we're not even special in the entire universe because there is Superman. There he is, an alien among us. We're not alone.
- Anatoli Knyazev: Drop it. I said drop it! I'll kill her! Believe me, I'll do it!
- Batman: I believe you.