"Failed? No, not really. You see, I know that although the Daleks will create havoc and destruction for millions of years, I know also that out of their evil must come something good."

"Excuse me, can you help me? I'm a spy."

"Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life. Ready to outsit eternity. They're indomitable."

"Never cared much for the word "impregnable." Sounds a bit too much like "unsinkable.""

"There's no point being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes."

"You may be a doctor. But I'm the Doctor. The definite article, you might say."

"Shut up, K-9!"

"Have a Jelly Baby."

"A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don't cry. While there's life there's... (Dies)"

"A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting."

"Courage isn't just a matter of not being frightened, you know. It's being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway."

"Allow me to congratulate you, sir. You have the most totally closed mind that I've ever encountered."

"It's all quite simple — I am he and he is me!"

"Obviously the Time Lords have programmed the TARDIS always to return to Earth. It seems that I'm some sort of galactic yo-yo!"

"Well, I'll tell you something that should be of vital interest to you. That you, Sir, are a NITWIT!"

"I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow."

"My dear Miss Shaw, I never report myself anywhere, particularly not forthwith."

"Keep it confused, feed it with useless information — I wonder if I have a television set handy?"

"I do tend to get involved."

"I hate computers and refuse to be bullied by them!"

"We're nowhere. It's as simple as that."

"An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie. Just act stupid. Do you think you can manage that?"

"People spend all their time making nice things and then other people come along and break them."

"The power cable generated an electrical field and confused their tiny metal minds. You might almost say they've had a complete metal breakdown."

"We've done exactly as you calculated, haven't we?"

"I am not a student of human nature. I am a professor of a far wider academy of which human nature is merely a part."

"There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things that act against everything we believe in. They must be fought!"

"Life depends on change, and renewal."

"I'd like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it spreads its wings."

"Slower! SLOWER! Concentrate on one thing! ONE thing!"

"Well then, here we go... the long way around."

"I suddenly realised what the old proverb meant: "To lose is to win, and he who wins shall lose!" It was all part of Rassilon's trap to find out who wanted immortality and put him out of the way! He knew very well that immortality was a curse, NOT a blessing!"

"So you're my replacements. Humph. A dandy and a clown."

"One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine."

"Our lives are important — at least to us — and as we see, so we learn... Our destiny is in the stars, so let's go and search for it."

"It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard, and now it's turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure."

"I don't believe that man was made to be controlled by machines. Machines can make laws, but they can not preserve justice. Only human beings can do that."

"As we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves."

"Fear makes companions of us all."

"Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the Fourth Dimension? Have you? To be exiles?"

"That's the great thing about the Doctor, he has the energy and mischief of a young child as well as the wisdom, age and intelligence of someone a lot older," she says. With Matt's performance, he's so believable that he isn't human. He has all these things that he does that make you believe he is an alien and you're drawn in by that."

"Oh there just aren’t enough good words to say about Matt. He’s amazing, and he’s the most gorgeous person, and I will really treasure being on stage with him, always, because he’s so special."

"The thrill he gets from music is something he wants theatre to be able to transmit. Of his favourite band, Radiohead, he says, with typical exuberance: "That’s it. That’s what I want when I go to the theatre, when I’m in a play, is them, and that experience that I get from them. I admire the musicianship, I admire the soul that goes into it, and the execution and the work, the preparation. Everything is done right, I think, and done with good intention and soul and heart and good spirit. They are a lesson to us all.""

"Smith is upbeat, open and chatty, with a goofy smile, dishevelled clothes and a tendency to fidget that makes him seem like a slightly nerdy younger brother all grown up. He has a genuine enthusiasm for everything he talks about, including the people he works with"

"Space and time, time and space — locked in an intricate dance across the cosmos — and if you know the tune, anything is possible."

"He's this sort of harborer of good and fun and madness, and he's the cleverest man in the universe — and the silliest man in the universe."

"I quite like the transitions of being an actor, because you get to explore these little pockets of life. So if you’re playing a builder you get to know about building, if you’re playing a scientist or a physician or something you get to know about physics. And similarly with this world I like exploring their culture, that very sort of upper middle class, addictive… that’s part of the reason I love it."

"But you know what? Matt Smith, man. In the middle of this train wreck, he does a bit with a severed Cyberman head that actually finds a heartstring. When Handles finally craps out and “dies,” Smith, in his late-middle-age makeup, calls his name a couple of times and stares at the thing. The look on his face evokes memories not just of the similarly robotic K-9, but also of all the other companions long gone. Another one, his face says. I’ve lost another one."

"The 50th Anniversary Special, “The Day of the Doctor,” offered a welcome respite from this dreary slog; it was easily the best Who episode Moffat had written since “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang.” Despite the generally positive notices the special got, some critics hated Moffat’s retconning the defining act of the revived series: It turns out that the Doctor didn’t actually kill all of the Time Lords, as it had been written by previous showrunner Russell T. Davies, he just hid them away in a pocket universe. While I find Moffat’s compulsion to insert his own characters into existing Who continuity annoying (c.f. the laughable Forrest Gumping of Clara into footage of Classic Doctors in “The Name of the Doctor”), I actually don’t think his rewriting of this act of genocide totally obviates the Davies era’s emotional content. So it turns out that the Time Lords are lost, instead of annihilated? Hell, the Doctor thought he’d destroyed the Daleks, too, and they just keep coming back. Why shouldn’t the Time Lords get an out? But while, within the context of the episode, this turning-already-established-defeat-into-victory didn’t bother me, it does fit into a pattern of storytelling cowardice on Moffat’s part. There are just never any consequences for any main characters in Moffat’s Doctor Who. Every apparent sacrifice, tragic loss, or moral compromise is invalidated by some kind of reset button, with no physical or psychological cost. The “loss” of the Ponds was so nonsensical that it doesn’t even count. They got to live full lives together in the past, but the Doctor could never go back and see them again? It’s insulting. Why not have the two of them make a meaningful sacrifice and actually, you know, die? Whose feelings is Moffat trying to spare here? As Capt. James T. Kirk witheringly observes of himself—in a neat bit of character development that also doubles as commentary on how static Kirk’s persona was during the original Star Trek series—he’d always been able to find the out, the cheat code, the reset button. He’d never had to face the no-win scenario. He thought he’d gotten away with it again—and then he found out that sometimes victory does have a cost, in this case, the life of his best friend. Now, in story terms, it sucks that the Star Trek franchise promptly undid this by bringing Spock back in the next movie, but it’s because of Kirk’s change and growth that Khan is rightly regarded as the best of the Trek films. The 11th Doctor is TV-show Kirk, not Wrath of Khan Kirk. He neither changed nor grew. Moffat even dubbed him “The Man Who Forgets” in the 50th Anniversary special—and in that episode, his journey is away from a defining, horrific moral choice he made, and towards a cheat code."