Sports Night · Season 1
If you wear something blue you get two dollars off a giant blue margarita.
You know I make a pretty good living. I can actually afford to wear what I want and pay full price.
I'm not promoting the economic upside as much as I am the opportunity to drink something giant and blue.
So you say a few words. You make a gesture. You remember an important date. A small price to pay for what you get in return. For what you get in return, it's a steal.
I've named this Thanksgiving. I'm calling it "The Thanksgiving of Mom's Disapproval." Included on the two-record set are the hit songs "Why Aren't You Married?" and "Sports Is No Place For An Educated Woman," and "Didn't Anyone Ever Tell You How To Cook a Turkey?"
A couple of months ago I wrote a check to someone. Now I'm in the middle of Dickensian London.
Two guys have ascended five miles into the sky. They walked up a wall of ice, and are preparing to knock on the door of Heaven itself. There's really no end to what we can do. You know what the trick is?
What?
Get in the game.
Look at me. I'm not lying to you. I have a straight.
How do you know I don't have a big house?
A FULL house. Dan already folded the six you needed, and I have the other one. You don't have a house of any sort, you don't have a pup tent. You've got trip sevens, and I have a straight. I want you to trust me right now. I want you to say to yourself, yeah, I've dated a string of jerks in my life, they were stupid, they were mean to me, but maybe this one's different. Maybe I should take a chance and not adopt the break-up-with-him-before-he-breaks-my-heart strategy. I want you to remember that when I started liking you, I didn't stop liking tennis. And I want you to know that I don't think there's a woman in the world that you need to be threatened by, no matter how glamorous you think she is. But mostly, I want you to trust me, just once, when I tell you you have three sevens, and I have a straight.
Anyway, I really appreciate the two of you sticking around and filling in.
It's no problem.
Oh, please, you think I wanna be stuck doing the two a.m.? This is just a temp gig.
Temp gig?
Temporary gig.
Thanks.
My stuff's out there. I talk to a lot of people.
Just as long as none of them are talkin' back.
CNBC, MSNBC—
M-O-U-S-E...
Danny—
Oh, like she's listening to anybody but herself.
Danny, I need to talk to you.
Good, 'cause I need to talk to you too. Who should go first?
Since I don't really care what you have to say, I think it should be me.
Exaudio, comperio, conloquor. That's a Latin phrase that translates "To listen, to learn, to speak." Those words are carved into the stone arches that form the entrance to the undergraduate library at Tennessee Western University. This afternoon, an extraordinary young man named Roland Shepard made what had to have been an excruciating decision. He said he wasn't playing football under a Confederate flag. Six of his teammates then chose not to let Shepard stand alone. And I choose to join them at this moment. In the history of the South, there's much to celebrate. And that flag is a desecration of all of it. It's a banner of hatred and separation. It's a banner of ignorance and violence and a war that pitted brother against brother, and to ask young black men and women, young Jewish men and women, Asians, Native Americans, to ask Americans to walk beneath its shadow is a humiliation of irreducible proportions. And we all know it. Tennessee Western has produced some outstanding alumni in the past hundred years. People of wisdom and vision. Strength and compassion. One of them is Luther Sachs. Luther Sachs owns Continental Corp. Which owns the Continental Sports Channel, which you're watching right now. Luther Sachs is a generous alumni contributor to Tennessee Western, with a considerable influence over its chancellor, Davis Blake, and its board of trustees. Luther, you've got a phone call to make. You've go to call Chancellor Blake, and tell him to take down that flag, or he can stop looking for your checks in the mail. You've got to put these young men back in a classroom. And I mean pronto. These boys are gonna make you proud one day, Luther. I challenge you to do the right thing. Not an unreasonable request to make of a man whose alma mater declares, "Exaudio, comperio, conloquor." "To listen, to learn, to speak." In the meantime, God go with you, Roland Shepard, and you six Southern gentlemen of Tennessee. God's not done with any of you, yet.
As we speak, one of your LC-Wire frames is misprocessing data while two of your associate producers stand over the monitor attempting to have phone sex.
Please don't tell me which two.
Just think about it.
All right, my guess is, it's Jeremy and Natalie.
May I add, Dana, that things I say in my office stay in my office.
Natalie's my second-in-command, she's the only one I told.
Jeremy's my boyfriend, he's the only one I told.
I told many, many people.
You think at a certain point during the evening you'll say something wonderful to me and I'll melt and that'll teach me for going out with Gordon instead of you.
I'll settle for you spilling something on yourself.
You want to leave the room?
No!
Then allow for the possibility that from time to time other people might be at least as smart as you are.
So, I'm gonna try telling you this story one more time.
Can I just make a suggestion?
Sure.
What if, instead of you telling me this story again right this second, you never tell me this story ever?
Wow.
Wow what?
Those cars are going fast.
Yeah, they're going as fast as they can because the first one across the finish line gets a trophy and a check.
Like a race?
Right.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Sports Night pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
