A quote from the opening of the H.G. Wells novel, War of the Worlds, is narrated in both 1980's Cosmos, and
War of the Worlds (2005): . . . in Cosmos a narrator orates, " . . . It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."
. . . whilst
Morgan Freeman narrates, " . . . No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they observed and studied, the way a man with a microscope might scrutinises the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro about the globe confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of space intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our planet with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."