Mad Men quotes

Don Draper

By love you mean big lightning bolts to the heart, where you can't eat and you can't work, and you just run off and get married and make babies. The reason you haven't felt is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me...to sell nylons.

Don Draper

You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I'm living like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't one.

Don Draper

Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.

Joan Holloway

He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they're looking for something between a mother and a waitress. And the rest of the time, well... Go home, take a paper bag and cut some eye holes out of it. Put if over your head, look in the mirror and try and evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. And try and be honest.

Don Draper

We should get married.

Midge Daniels

You think I'd make a good ex-wife?

Don

Suggesting that our customers have a...what did you call it? A death wish? I just don't see that on a billboard.

Don

Except they aren't.

That's your slogan? "You're going to die anyway. Die with us"?

Pete

Actually, it's a fairly well-established psychological principle that society has a death wish, and if we could just tap into that, the market potential is--

What the hell are you talking about? Are you insane? I'm not selling rifles here, I'm in the tobacco business! We're selling America! The Indians gave it to us, for shit's sake!

Don Draper

Let me ask you something, what do women want?

Roger Sterling

Who cares?

Roger Sterling

Psychiatry is just this year's candy pink stove.

Betty Draper

[To her psychiatrist] I don't know why I'm here. I mean, I do, I'm nervous, I guess. Anxious. I don't sleep that well. And my hands. They're fine now, it's like when you have a problem with your car and you go to a mechanic and it's not doing it anymore. Not that you're a mechanic. I guess a lot of people must come here worried about the bomb. Is that true? It's a common nightmare, people say. I read it in a magazine. My mother always told me that it wasn't polite to talk about yourself. She passed away recently. I guess I already said that.

Roger Sterling

You know what? I am very comfortable with my mind. Thoughts clean and unclean, loving and... the opposite of that. But I am not a woman. And I think it behooves any man to toss all female troubles into the hands of a stranger.

Paul Kinsey

Sterling Cooper is positively Cro-Magnon. I have a friend - I'm not even going to say what agency - but all they do is smoke Mary Jane and play darts. And honestly, I think they're the best store on the street.

It's hard to get caught in a lie.

Don Draper

It wasn't a lie, it was ineptitude with insufficient cover.

Roger Sterling

I bet there were people in the Bible walking around, complaining about "kids today."

Don Draper

Kids today, they have no one to look up to. 'Cause they're looking up to us.

Pete Campbell

I have ideas.

Don Draper

I'm sure you do. Sterling Cooper has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.