The West Wing · Season 7
[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?
Men are like salmon. Swimming upstream, hosing down the riverbed with their indiscriminate seed...
Indiscriminate seed?
Until...
Did you just say "indiscriminate seed"?
Until they die, bloated and spent, belly-up in the sun.
Oh, quit sweet-talkin' me, baby.
Unless they get taken out with a bear paw in the waterfall, as they deserve to be.
What's wrong?
Close the door.
I didn't do it.
Close the door.
Toby did it.
Shut up!
[closes the door] Gonna talk now? [silence] Seriously. I don't react well to this... It's like staring at a dog.
I think Doug Westin is having an affair with his nanny.
Geez! I don't wanna know that! Why did you tell me that?
Because you deal with the press and I don't want you to get blind sided.
Exactly! I work with the press. I do my best work when I'm the least informed person in the room. You taught me that.
Suck it up.
Yes, we worry about what's happening in the culture: we have two young children. But censorship is like saying I can't have a steak because a baby can't chew it. Let's be careful. Yeah?
[Trying to persuade the California governor to evacuate San Andreo] Better a few fender benders on the I-5 than a generation of babies with thyroid cancer.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's The West Wing pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
