BONES: This is not good.
BOOTH: Yeah, thanks for that insight.
BONES: No, I mean the architecture of the skull has been radically altered.
BOOTH: You mean by rotting and being eaten by coyotes and having the face ripped off by you?
BONES: No, by surgery... lots of surgery. I'm not sure I'll be able to tell who this was.

BONES: Every culture nurtures ideals of beauty toward which people strive. Fine, but in the future people will look back upon the surgical alterations of the nose or breasts or buttocks with the same horror that we regard binding of the feet or the use of bronze coils to extend the neck.
BOOTH: Do you want to speak up because it's really hard to hear every word in this very, very quiet waiting room?
BONES: It's barbaric. It's painful. It's wrong. This murder victim may never be identified because some glorified barber with a medical degree had the arrogance to think that he could do better then the millennium of evolution.

HODGINS: You wanted to see me?
DR. GOODMAN: You are a very difficult and stubborn man, Dr. Hodgins. Right now, I would like nothing more than to fire you. In my position, very few people tell me the truth anymore. I find I enjoy it in some perverse way.
HODGINS: Are you willing to admit you bailed on the authentication?
DR. GOODMAN: Yes.
HODGINS: Seriously?
DR. GOODMAN: But not for the reasons you think. True, we might be able to authenticate the skeleton by taking it apart, destroying it. If he's a fake, that would be fine. Nothing lost. But I think he's the real thing.
HODGINS: You do know he has been dead for fifteen hundred years, right?
DR. GOODMAN: I am an archeologist. This is what we do. We step outside the facts and tell ourselves the story of an individual or a culture. And if the story I tell myself about this man who lived fifteen hundred years ago is true.