TV show quotes
[going over the guest list] Andrew Edward... what's he doing in the H's? Oh, right! His Royal Highness, Duke of York.
[Vic stands up and looks uncomfortable]
Do you want to get some air?
Hey, at least he's not bringing the Queen. [pauses and checks the list] Oh, maybe he is bringing the Queen...
[about Santos] He's not presidential material.
Why?
Why? Because he left. He left Congress. He left Washington to go home and do small, important work. You had to haul him by the hair out of the family bed. Did you never stop to wonder if that was a good choice?
He stepped up. When presented with the opportunity...
[interrupting] A man in that job shouldn't have to be presented with anything. It's for someone who grabs it and holds onto it. For someone who thinks the gods have conspired to bring him to this place. That destiny demands of him this service! You don't have that kind of drive, that hubris, how in the hell are you gonna make the kind of decisions that stump every other person in this country? How in the hell are you gonna hold that kind of power in your hand?”
You don't know he's not that man.
You don't know that he is. [pauses] Is he? Look me in the eye and tell me that you know. Without a shadow of a doubt...you know. [pauses] That's why the other guy wins.
You're not performing at the ceremony.
I wasn't asked to.
Sir, I'm sorry to interrupt--
No, that's quite all right. He was about to go into his Spencer Tracy routine.
So, rumor has it you're going to have a chat with the groom tomorrow morning.
I am.
Well, that will be lovely, I'm sure!
What? I did it with Doug!
Yeah. I don't recall that as being an unqualified success.
Well, now I've had a run of it.
You do know that talking him out of marrying your daughter is not an option.
Yeah. [pause] You really think it's not an option?
[at a press conference on TV] Uh, they'll be walking down the aisle to "Sorge Nel Patto", the aria Gaffredo sings to his daughter in Handel's Rinaldo. The aria was picked for its beauty and its text, which translates roughly to, "a certain delight surges from my breast and promises to calm my heart."
That was lovely.
I made it up. Don't tell.
Sir, was there something you wanted to discuss?
No, no. I just thought...you know, when you have a daughter, you just like to know...you really want to know whether...ah, hell. Just tell me you decided to marry her before you got her pregnant.
Eleven months, two weeks and three days.
Excuse me?
That's when I decided to marry her: a year ago, on our third date.
What was wrong with the first two?
[about Josh] How'd it go?
Fine.
You taking over?
No.
Leo, I thought we...
Josh is going to make a lot of strategic decisions over the next few weeks. He's going to sweat them like life and death. And they'll be important, sure, which is why you and me are going to be in on every one of them. But they're meaningless compared to the decision the voters are going to have to make just by listening to you and trying to see if they can connect with the idea of Matt Santos as President. And Josh has nothing to do with that. Goodwin's right: Josh has taken you as far as he can. The rest is up to you.
Good evening. On December 16, we lost our good friend and colleague John Spencer. Through our shock and grief, we can think of no more fitting memorial to this wonderful man, this extraordinary actor, than to share with you, beginning tonight, the last few months of his work here on The West Wing. Johnny, it seems we hardly knew you; we love you and we miss you.
[Josh and Donna are on the phone with each other]
Tell Josh to chill.
Josh, chill.
Did you just tell me to chill?
It would appear so.
Is it somehow not clear that I'm your boss?
Congressman's recommendation.
Oh.
To which I heartily concur.
Yeah, I don't think you tell me to chill.
I wanted to scream it everyday for eight years.
Whatever inhibition prevented you, summon it.
Is there a problem?
It's just that when you said you were going to come home and spend time with the kids, I thought you were going to spend some time with the kids.
I played with them this morning.
I don't want to get in their faces. They're sick.
They have head colds. It's unlikely you'll start bleeding from the eyes.
I'm in the middle of a Presidential campaign.
That's where you've been nights.
I know it's been rough.
The kids being issued panic buttons and the house transformed into an armed camp?
A bit of an exaggeration.
Do the windows in here look any different?
No, not really.
It's amazing the natural look they can achieve now with bulletproof glass. Labor Day, the barbecue: I had to provide the Secret Service with everyone's names, Social Security numbers, birth dates. To come by and have a hot dog, everybody had to be issued ID pins. My mother walking around tagged like she was some threatening wacko. If you're considering this an opportunity to crack a mother-in-law joke, you are seriously misjudging the mood of your audience.
[pause] I had a real good one, too.
Yeah, what?
Too late. [pause] I'm sorry. Tomorrow will be better.
[Helen laughs.]
Hey, think about the neat place we get to live in once we win this thing.
I forget, in D.C. do they allow felons to vote? [pause] Too soon?
Yeah, a little bit.
Get some rest. I need you to look pretty for 20 million TV viewers.
If that's what we're counting on, the campaign is doomed.
I wanna do my job. I wanna suck every morsel of meat off this experience before it's over.
Just get something done, will ya?
That'll come down to what it always comes down to.
What's that?
How dirty do my feet have to get without disappearing into the mud in order to get an inch of what I really want done.
Relaxing makes me nervous. It feels like I'm missing something.
We're both about to fall off a cliff. And I don't know what I'm gonna do with the rest of my life, except I know what I don't wanna do. And on Inauguration Day, you're going to be released from that glorious prison on Pennsylvania Avenue, with...
No human skills?
Seems to me...
I should punch you in the face.
That's what I'm talking about.
Keep going...
So, if I'm gonna jump off the cliff, and you're gonna get pushed off the cliff, why don't we hold hands on the way down?
These quotes come from Wikiquote's The West Wing pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
