We've been over this. We need a hard news announcement each and every day or the press runs amok!
S5Slow News Day
[about Social Security] If it becomes public we've even discussed this, both sides will go crazy. It'll jeopardize our whole agenda on the Hill.
What if I do it? I'll do all the negotiating. You'll have total deniability. No one else in this building has to know.
And if it blows up, I'm supposed to pretend we've never met?
We'll always have Paris. [beat] Mr. President, life expectancy's rising. The biggest generation, ever, is retiring and we don't have the money! Every year we wait means we have to cut deeper, take away more, 'til Social Security's not enough to live on... 'til retirement's a one- way ticket to a flop house. We have an opening. There's seventeen ways to fix it. Twenty years of blue-ribbon commissions have told us how. This isn't a government program, it is a moral covenant. We don't want to be the administration that saves it from oblivion? We don't want that legacy?
Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
There's a reason we have a chain of command. So people don't take flyers and I don't hand you their resignations.
I wanted to believe he could do it. I wanted to believe as much as he did.
This isn't Never-never Land, sir. Believing is not enough.
You would've stopped it.
Because it's my job.
It's my life, Leo. I'm the one who's accountable. And not in the morning papers, not in the Democratic cloakroom, but in 50 or a 100 years when Tuesday's poll samples have crumbled into dust.
You can't will yourself a legacy.
You think there's a room at the Smithsonian for guys who never even tried?
Closest we've been to a deal in 20 years and it breaks down over who we approached first.
If you approach the Republicans, he's a right-wing sell out, if you approach the Democrats, he's a fire-breathing partisan.
Hard enough caving on principle without looking like you're caving on principle.
And, we have a little problem called the Wall Street Journal.
We don't take credit.
What?
We don't take credit at all.
It's the only way.
They approached each other. Bi-partisan down the line. No one can say I'm setting anyone up.
Mr. President, a victory like this comes along once in a generation.
We'll have practically saved the New Deal and no one will even know we were in the room.
We'll know. And if we don't do this... if this system collapses, which is what'll happen, if we go back to breadlines, if growing old in America means growing poor again ... we'll know that, too.
There is no such thing as an invisible legacy, sir.
You have to know you'd be giving it away.
All day we've been talking about my legacy, my portrait, what's going to be carved on my tombstone. Maybe we pay a little more attention to what's being rendered. And the rendering takes care of itself.
S5The Warfare of Genghis Khan
My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
The personal computer...
A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
I thought when the Soviet Union fell, we could actually have disarmament. You go from trying to get rid of these weapons altogether to holding your breath that one doesn't go off on your watch. Strike another goal off the list.
What I know is politics, public perception. And the image of NASA is not good. Telescopes launched that can't focus, planetary probes that crashed because engineers mixed up meters and feet. The only time NASA makes the front page anymore is when something goes wrong. You need to get off the front page. This administration only has one space priority: that you guys stop screwing up.
Voyager, in case it's ever encountered by extraterrestrials, is carrying photos of life on earth, greetings in fifty-five languages, and a collection of music from Gregorian chant to Chuck Berry, including "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" by 1920s bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, whose stepmother blinded him at seven by throwing lye in his eyes after his father beat her for being with another man. He died penniless of pneumonia after sleeping bundled in wet newspapers in the ruins of his house that burned down, but his music just left the solar system.
Hans Bethe wrote, "If we fight a war and win it with H-Bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for, but the methods used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who brutally killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
Sir, given the volatility of the region, a secret test would be how Iran would certainly proceed.
All right, let's put our cards on the table. What helped keep the Cold War cold was a sense of moral restraint that these weapons were too terrible to use.
That restraint won't exist in jihadists who strap bombs to their chests and enter nightclubs.
SSliger
There are moderate elements on the ascendancy in Iran.
"In the Koran, God commanded to kill the wicked and those who do not see the rights of the oppressed and to murder them. If we abide by the Koran, all of us should mobilize to kill." Televised address by President Alijani: Moderate.
Thank you for coming, Mr. Prime Minister. You've had a long flight and I've had a long last day and a half. Let's not waste any time with veiled questions and coy answers. Your government conducted an atmospheric nuclear test over the Indian Ocean 36 hours ago. This action poses enormous problems for the region, for the world.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
And for the U.S.
Yes. It undercuts our counterproliferation policy and makes us look at best, biased, and at worst, like outright hypocrites.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
You do not look hypocritical espousing nonproliferation while funding research on a new generation of tactical nuclear bombs? This is not my view. The U.S. is merely looking after its national interest. As Israel has the right to do.
Proliferation breeds proliferation. China's bomb produced India's. India's begat Pakistan's.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
The United States' ideal number of nuclear weapon states is one. No matter if it's merited or arrogant, it is irrelevant. Our chief of Military Intelligence asserts that if Iran completes its enrichment program it will be able to produce nuclear weapons within one year.
No one disputes Israel lives under threat.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
Threat? We are 6 million surrounded by 200 million who wish us obliterated. For Israel, deterrence is not an option, but an imperative.
There's a fine line between deterrence and provocation.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
We model our approach on America's during the Cold War: Mutual Assured Destruction.
There's a reason its acronym was MAD.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
It succeeded entirely in keeping the world safe. Iran will become a nuclear state. I mean, what difference if it takes one year or five or ten? What difference?
We can stop them. By force if it comes to that.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
But should this fail, all that would stand in the way of an Iranian first strike is an assured second-strike capability. Submarines armed with nuclear missiles. Mr. President, this is essential for Israel's survival.
Your argument boils down to asking the world to trust you.
IPIsraeli Prime Minister
As does America's.
It's telling that the physicists involved in the creation of these weapons became the most fervid opponents of their use. Einstein, Oppenheimer, Szilárd. Hans Bethe wrote, "If we fight a war and win it with H-Bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for, but the methods used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who brutally killed every last inhabitant of Persia."
S5An Khe
That was fun! Sanctimonious little guttersnipe sent a great big fat one up and over the plate. Health care reform! From a guy who's still on the fence about the application of leeches!
Eve Harrington in penny loafers here just corrected me in front of the President.
Were you wrong?
That's not the point.
What is the point?
I'm going into my office now.
Taylor Reid was talking about your spin on the decline in manufacturing jobs and he said...
'The tall lady's back to telling tall tales.'
The tall lady.... Carol, call 'The Taylor Reid Show' and book me on the next open slot. I'm going to reach down and rip off his puny, little face.
Toby and Josh are in your office.
What do they want?
To make fun of you, I think.
And you let them in?
And made them coffee.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's The West Wing pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.