- Commander Sisko: [about Mardah] Quark may call her a dabo girl; but she's twenty years old. She's a woman, and Jake is a sixteen-year-old boy. It has to stop.
- Chief O'Brien: Well, why did you invite her over, if you don't mind my asking?
- Commander Sisko: Curiosity, mostly. I want to see what I was up against.
- Chief O'Brien: What if it turns out you like her?
- Commander Sisko: She's a dabo girl, she's dating my son - I don't want to like her.
- Jake Sisko: Mrs. O'Brien used to say that Mardah should try to get some of her stories published.
- Mardah: Jake, they aren't that good.
- Jake Sisko: Yes, they are.
- Mardah: Nothing like your poetry.
- Jake Sisko: You don't have enough faith in yourself.
- Commander Sisko: P-poetry - y-you write... poetry?
- Jake Sisko: Well - sort of. Not... not really.
- Mardah: Now who doesn't have enough faith in himself?
- Mardah: [to Sisko] He writes some of the most beautiful things I've ever read. That's what won me over.
- Commander Sisko: [becoming more and more bewildered] Er... His... poetry?
- Mardah: And the way he plays dom-jot.
- [Jake winces]
- Commander Sisko: You play dom-jot?
- Mardah: Oh, your son can play. He's quite the hustler.
- Commander Sisko: A hustler?
- Major Kira: I never thought I would say this to you, Odo, but you are listening to your heart, not your head. That boy was created in a laboratory! His body, his mind, his instincts, are all designed to do one thing: to kill.
- Odo: My body, mind, and instincts were designed to be a Founder. You were trained to be a terrorist. But each of us chose to be something different. I just want to give him the same chance we've had!
- Major Kira: All right. Give him a chance. Just don't forget, he is a Jem'Hadar. He's dangerous!
- Chief O'Brien: [seeing Jake walk by with Mardah] I thought you were gonna lower the boom on those two.
- Commander Sisko: Well, I was; but some things came up at dinner I didn't expect.
- Chief O'Brien: Ah - got to know her a little better, decided you liked her after all?
- Commander Sisko: No, actually I got to know Jake a little better. Have you ever played dom-jot with him?
- Chief O'Brien: Nope.
- Commander Sisko: Don't.
- [Sisko has just met the baby found in the wreckage of a ship]
- Lieutenant Jadzia Dax: You are positively glowing! I haven't seen that look on your face since...
- Commander Sisko: ...since Jake stopped wearing diapers.
- Mardah: Jake seemed like just another teenage boy at first. But there's more to him than that.
- Commander Sisko: I'm beginning to realize that myself...
- [Sisko has been ordered to send the Jem'Hadar to another starbase]
- Commander Sisko: There will be a complete team of xenobiologists and exopsychologists waiting for him.
- Odo: So they're going to study him, like a laboratory specimen.
- Commander Sisko: Well, he'll be very well treated.
- Odo: [sarcastically] So he'll be a well treated specimen.
- Odo: I also know what it's like to be a specimen in a laboratory. Oh, I'm sure they'll treat him very well. No one will risk harming their new prize. They'll be courteous, caring, treat him like he's among friends, but in the end, he'll be just another specimen to them, something to be analyzed and cataloged. Give me the chance to find out if he really is just a programed killing machine - or if we can help him become something else.
- Odo: Is that all you can think about? Killing? Isn't there anything else you care about?
- Jem'Hadar Teenager: I don't think so.
- Odo: We need to find other interests for you to pursue. For the moment, why don't you relax? Try not to be so tense. Take it easy. Smile.
- Jem'Hadar Teenager: Why do you want to look like a humanoid? You're better than they are. You're a Changeling.
- Odo: That doesn't make me better. Just different.
- Jem'Hadar Teenager: I'm not like these other humanoids. I'm a Jem'Hadar. And that's what I want to be. You're not like these other humanoids either. But they've done something to you. They've filled your mind with, with ideas, with these beliefs. I don't know what the other Changelings are like. But I know they're not like you.
- Chief O'Brien: [referring to the Founders] I still don't understand why they would engineer someone to be addicted to a certain chemical.
- Odo: I suspect it's another way of ensuring the loyalty of the Jem'Hadar to the Founders. If your soldiers are addicted to a drug that can't be replicated and only you can provide, that gives you a great deal of control over them.
- Chief O'Brien: Seems a pretty cold-blooded thing to do.
- Odo: My people don't have blood, Chief.
- Jem'Hadar Teenager: I now know that anyone who is not a Jem'Hadar, is my enemy.
- Odo: Does that include me?
- Odo: [to a teenage Jem'Hadar Odo's taken to one of Quark's Holosuites] In here, you can indulge yourself. You can let your instincts take over. Fight until you're ready to stop, but at a price. Out there you have to control yourself. You have to learn restraint. Learn how to live peacefully among other races regardless of how you may feel. Learn to contain your feelings of aggression and violence.
- Commander Sisko: But there are times when I would give almost anything for the days when I could make Jake happy... just by lifting him over my head.