Scripted fictional lines only (not paragraphs), please, and no lists-just your personal favorite. If you can’t make up your mind try harder, and since this isn’t a contest it is o.k. to agree with someone else’s choice.
For me it would have to be from the ABC miniseries Laces, when Lili (Phoebe Cates) says to the three other female leads, “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”.
Yours?
“As god is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
ETA: I’m second guessing myself, positive that something else will come to me, but since this was the first one that came to me, I’m going with it.
I don’t want to be a pirate.
After putting about 0.3 seconds of thought into it I’m gonna go with “Not the momma” even though I don’t think that’s actually the single greatest line in tv history
From?
“Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan… it spun in. There were no survivors”.
Either from the Pilot of the Mary Tyler Moore Show:
Lou Grant: “I hate Spunk”
From MtM production, WKRP in Cincinnati.
Mr. Carlson, “As God is my Witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
The perfect ending to “Turkeys Away” one of the best episodes in TV history.
“I’m out!”
Seinfeld, “The Contest” - Kramer quits the “no-sex” contest after spending less than a minute alone
“Not the Momma” is from the series “Dinosaurs”
I suggest "If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home, and crawl under your bed. " from ST:TNG
From Taxi-What does the yellow light mean?
There was an old sitcom with Matt Frewer called “Doctor Doctor” that ran for a couple of years. One line that has always stuck with me was when someone accidentally spilled a cup of coffee in his lap and he said “Boy, I hope that was decaf or I’m going to be up all night!”
Runner up is Dave Foley’s “I’ll get a space heater” line from the NewsRadio episode in space, but it’s not funny on its own, they were building up to it through the whole episode.
Actually, I was asking about the line from the post above yours: “I don’t want to be a pirate.”
I remember that one! Someone should start a thread about lines that got past the television censors.
“We were on a break!”
So easy to slide into almost any situation in any conversation.
Go slower!
My suggestion: From Angel:
“And yet, somehow, I just can’t seem to care”.
He says this to Holland Manners while locking Wolfram & Hart lawyers in a basement to be killed by Darla and Drusilla, two vampires, one of which W&H went out of their way to make back into a vampire after they’d reincarnated her as a human as part of their plan to hurt Angel. It’s particularly cold, as Angel is quoting Holland Manners back to himself, this is what Holland said to Angel when Angel was asking him about all the people suffering because of the evil people like the lawyers at W&H cause.
many episodes of the Wire
It’s Seinfeld, but I don’t remember which episode
The puffy shirt?
Like the eternal man of Babylonian legend, like Gilgamesh, one thousand plus two hundred years stretches before Trent. Without love, without friendship, alone
From the epilogue to Demon with a Glass Hand, The Outer Limits (1964). Script by Harlan Ellison.
My personal favorite science fiction TV episode of all time.
A few contenders from the Blackadder series iMO. The one that comes immediately to mind is:
When I joined up we were still fighting colonial wars. If you saw someone in a skirt you shot him and nicked his country
Blackadder IV. Espisode: General Hospital (I thought this episode was called Spy)