20 Hours in America
Margaret: Speaking of health and fitness…
Leo: Oh, merciful God!
Margaret: What did you have…
Leo: I had half a grapefruit!
Margaret: Really?
Leo: You think I’m lying?
Margaret: No.
Leo: Okay.
Margaret: Yes.
Season 04
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College Kids
Bartlet: …’Joy cometh in the morning,’ scripture tells us. I hope so. I don’t know if life would be worth living if it didn’t. And I don’t yet know who set off the bomb at Kennison State. I don’t know if it’s one person or ten, and I don’t know what they want. All I know for sure, all I know for certain, is that they weren’t born wanting to do this. There’s evil in the world, there’ll always be, and we can’t do anything about that. But there’s violence in our schools, too much mayhem in our culture, and we can do something about that. There’s not enough character, discipline, and depth in our classrooms; there aren’t enough teachers in our classrooms. There isn’t nearly enough, not nearly enough, not nearly enough money in our classrooms, and we can do something about that. We’re not doing nearly enough, not nearly enough to teach our children well, and we can do better, and we must do better, and we will do better, and we will start this moment today! They weren’t born wanting to do this.
The Red Mass
Josh: We run the risk of alienating…
Bartlet: Heroin addicts?
Josh: Liberals.
Bartlet: Whatever.
Debate Camp
Bartlet: [to Leo] Honey, if we’re going to have this fight, can we not do it in front of the Joint Chiefs? It just scares the hell out of them.
Game On
Josh: Ten words: “I will make America’s defenses the strongest in the history of the world.”
Leo: “In the history of the world?” When we say that, are we comparing ourselves to the Visigoths, adjusted for inflation?
Election Night
Sam: You wrote a concession?
Toby: Of course I wrote a concession. What, do you want to tempt the wrath of the… whatever, from high atop the thing?
Sam: No.
Toby: Then go outside, turn around three times and spit. What’s the hell is the matter with you?
Sam: It’s like, 25 degrees outside.
Toby: Go!
Process Stories
Sam: She wanted a name for election night and I said, ‘Use my name,’ not thinking for a second it was ever going to be a practical option. Can I ask, is your office now The House of the Rising Sun?
C.J.: Yes.
Toby: You did it for the widow.
Sam: Yes, and for a guy I met named Will Bailey who was running the campaign and worked his ass off and never backed off and, by the way, navigated a dead liberal Democrat to a win against Chuck Webb! Five hundred races tonight, that was pretty impressive. Though it was an Aristotelian confluence of events that could only happen to me.
Swiss Diplomacy
Bartlet: [loudly] Debbie! Where the hell are you? Where are my glasses?
Debbie: Right here, Mr. President. And the Ipswitch clams in Chesepeake Bay can hear you bellowing right now.
Bartlet: Ipswich clams don’t come from Chesepeake Bay they come from Ipswich.
Debbie: Not anymore.
Bartlet: [to Leo] Have her beheaded for my birthday.
Arctic Radar
Toby: Call and response isn’t going to work in front of a Joint Session. You’re alliteration happy: ‘guardians of gridlock,’ ‘protectors of privilege.’ I needed an avalanche of Advil. And when you use pop-culture references, your speech has a shelf life of twelve minutes. You don’t mind constructive criticism, do you?
Will: No, sir.
Toby: Anyway, thanks for coming in. I told Sam I can do this by myself.
Will: Well, maybe he thought that your speeches were obscurantist policy tracts lost in a cul-de-sac of their own internal self-righteousness and groaning from the weight of statistics. I’m just speculating. I can’t say for sure.
Toby: [pause; Toby smirks] A 500-word stanza on American leadership in a globally interdependent age that moves beyond triumphalism by this time tomorrow. If it’s 501, don’t show it to me.
Holy Night
Will: Seriously, Toby, you put me in that office and everyone who works on the speech-writing staff is gonna resent me.
Toby: Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a West Wing office. Everyone who works in the White House is gonna resent you.
Guns Not Butter
Bartlet: It’s the curse of every daughter’s father.
Charlie: Boyfriends?
Bartlet: I don’t like them, I don’t like them at all.
Charlie: Yes, I know sir.
Bartlet: What the hell happened with you two? It was perfect. I just kept you in the office all the time.
Charlie: Well, she was unhappy that I was at the office all the time.
Bartlet: That was the point. If I was trying to make her happy, I’d buy her a Cabriolet.
The Long Goodbye
C.J.: [on the phone] No, I didn’t mean that you have no social skills, Toby… I’m sorry if you think I was being insensitive to your… I think you’re very… you’re a very pretty girl, Toby.
Inauguration Part 1
Bartlet: I have a problem.
Josh: Well, you’re about to propose the most massive shift in foreign policy since the Marshall Plan and it’s going to be wildly unpopular.
Bartlet: All right: two problems.
Inauguration: Over There
Will: I heard once - I don’t know if this is true - I heard once that you convinced the President to let you rewrite a section of the State of the Union with less than twenty-four hours to go. It was the second year and everybody was a Republican, whether they were or not, and people at the DNC had convinced him to include the line, ‘The era of big government is over.’ And you couldn’t live with it. Because government should be a place where people come together and no one gets left behind. An instrument of good. And that’s exactly what we heard in the State of the Union the next night.
Toby: There were maybe four people in the room when I had that conversation.
Will: Well, if I’d have been one of them, I would have repeated it to everyone I met.
California 47th
Bartlet: Leo said just now that there was going to be an NEC briefing on scoring and tell her what I said.
Leo: ‘What’s wrong with booze and a comfortable pickup?’
Debbie: No, I see there’s no hour too early for your Noel Cowardesque wit, sir.
Red Haven’s on Fire
Sam: [in jail] How’d you call Josh? Didn’t they take your cell phone from you?
Toby: [motioning to a group of prostitutes] I used theirs.
Sam: So on a call-girl’s phone bill, there’s gonna be a call to Air Force One?
Toby: You really gonna be teaching a seminar on call-girl caution? Really?
Privateers
Abbey: So we’re for freedom of speech everywhere but poor countries, where they can have our help, but only if they live up to Clancy Bangert’s moral standards? What the hell kind of free world are you running?
Bartlet: I really don’t know, Abby. The day hasn’t started yet.
Angel Maintenance
Will: There’s a Festival of Lights and Bonfires in this region that accompanies something called the Wildflower, you know, Renaissance, with lilac and ochre.
Reporter: That you can see from thirty-three thousand feet?
Will: Yes, it’s arranged in a pattern that befuddles astronomers to this day. We should be coming up on it any…
Chris: Oh my God!
Will: Of course, on the right side of the plane, there’s an F-16 Falcon.
Life on Mars
Joe: I know that when life expectancy goes up, that’s not victimizing undertakers.
C.J.: Well argued, though I do hate you and everything you stand for.
Joe: Claudia Jean, you’ve only known me for four minutes. Usually it takes people the better part of an hour to hate me and everything I stand for.
C.J.: I’m the Press Secretary, Boo-Boo. I don’t have that kind of time.
Commencement
Special Agent Wesley Davis: [to Josh] You know I could kill you and just make up the reason why I did, right?
Twenty Five
Leo: [to C.J.] Do not get into a discussion of the President’s emotional state. You have to pivot whatever you get to Commander-in-Chief…We’re in control. The government is functioning. This is the most important press conference of your life.
