President Bartlet Quotes Season 1

"With the clothes on their backs, they came through a storm. And those that didn't die want a better life. And they want it here. Talk about impressive. My point is this: break's over."

"I'm not comfortable with violence."

"I am not frightened. I'm going to blow them off the face of the earth with the fury of God's own thunder."

"Let the word ring forth from this time and this place. You kill an American, any American, we don't come back with a proportional response, we come back with total disaster!"

"Did you know that 2000 years ago, a Roman Citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation. He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the protection of the words ‘civus romanus': I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens. Where was Morris' protection or anyone else on that airplane? Where was the retribution for the families? Where is the warning to the rest of the world, that Americans shall walk this earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most powerful nation in all mankind comes crashing down on your house? In other words... what the hell are we doing here?... Well, our behavior has produced some crappy results, in fact I'm not sure that it hasn't induced it. I am talking about 286 American Marines in Beirut. I am talking about Somalia. I'm talking about Nairobi. He had a ten day old baby at home. We are doing nothing."

"When I think of all the work you put in to get me to run, when I think of all the work you did to get me elected... I could pummel your ass with a baseball bat."

"What'll be the next thing that challenges us...that makes us work harder and go farther? You know, when smallpox was eradicated, it was considered the single greatest humanitarian achievement of this century. Surely, we can do it again. As we did in the time when our eyes looked toward the heavens, and with outstretched fingers, we touched the face of God."

"Let the good fight begin."

"Don't you ever forget the battles you have fought and won." [

"You know, I was watching a television program before with a sort of a roving moderator who spoke to a seated panel of young women who were having some sort of problem with their boyfriends, apparently because the boyfriends had all slept with the girlfriends' mothers. Then they brought the boyfriends out and they all fought right there on television. Tell me...these people don't vote do they?"

"You'll do fine. People have phenomenal capacity."

"We cannot execute some people and not execute others depending on the mood of the Oval Office. It's cruel and unusual."

"Just be wrong. Just stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it."

"Can we get this godforsaken event over with so I can get back to presiding over a civilization gone to hell in a handcart?"

"I really did wake up energized this morning. I never go to bed that way. Just once in this job I'd like to end a day feeling as good as I did when the day started."

"This is more important than re-election, I want to speak now."

I get nervous around laws that fundamentally assume that Americans can't be trusted. We better have mandatory sentencing, because judges can't be trusted to disperse even-handed justice... We better have term limits, 'cause voters can't be trusted to recognize corruption. Oh, and by the way... I say, by the way, when the playing field is level and the process is fair and open, it turns out we have term limits. They're called elections... My father was very fond of the analogy of the Irish lads whose journey was blocked by a brick wall, seemingly too high to scale. Throwing their caps over the wall, the lads had no choice but to follow. How many times in the great history of our country have we come to a wall seemingly too high to scale only to throw our caps to the other side?... Tomorrow morning, we're going to begin to change the way elections are supervised in this country."

"I'm sleeping better. When I sleep, I dream about a great discussion with experts and ideas and diction and energy and honesty. And when I wake up, I think, ‘I can sell that.'"

"Well, thanks for trying but here I am anyway."

"‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,' they said, ‘that all men are created equal.' Strange as it may seem, that was the first time in history that anyone had ever bothered to write that down. Decisions are made by those who show up."

Links

go back to qoutes main page
home