Quotable Quotes

“You watch 24 and you know the entire thing is ridiculous, but you can’t help yourself. You want more. We’re like Pavlov’s dog, except rather than a bell, we’re triggered by that digital ticking clock and the Heempt! Heemps! Heemp! opening each segment.”

-- John Kass, columnist, the Chicago Tribune

“24’s ideology—Jack Bauerism, if you will—is not so much in between left and right as it is outside them, impatient with both A.C.L.U. niceties and Bushian moral absolutes.”

–James Poniewozik, television critic for TIME magazine.

“In a world of people that are second-guessing so many situations, from their own politics to the way they live their lives, this is someone who actually knows that he can make a mistake, but believes in his heart so deeply that he’s correct in what he’s choosing to do, that he’s going to act upon that.”

– Kiefer Sutherland, on how he understands Jack Bauer, the character he plays.

On 24, torture is less an unfortunate last resort than an epistemology. Whenever an urgent or sticky question of fact arises, someone—bad guy or good guy, terrorist or counter terror agent; it doesn't matter—automatically sparks up the electrodes or starts filling syringes with seizure juice.

– Matt Feeney, cultural critic on Slate.com

“The most interesting complications that ensue as a season of 24 unfolds are the moral ones. And the show's great virtue is that it never pretends that these dilemmas are simple or false….You don’t need to watch 24 as a kind of primer on moral philosophy, but you probably should.”

–Brian M. Carney, The Wall Street Journal.

“We do want democratic process, but we also want justice. And the show allows us to have both, and that's why we love it.

– David Heyman, terrorism scholar, The Heritage Foundation.

“It’s a show. It could be completely realistic or it could be entertainment. Which do you want?”

–Carlos Bernard, who played CTU agent Tony Almeida for several seasons on 24.

“If the Democrats are like the dithering “Desperate Housewives,” the Republicans have come across like the counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer on 24: fast with a gun, loose with the law, willing to torture in the name of protecting the nation. Except Jack Bauer is competent.”

–New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.”

– Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, speaking at a judicial conference in Ottawa, Canada.

“In this age of terror and worldwide insecurity, 24 created the illusion of an all-American super agent on whose watch the bad guys, whether Muslims or Russians or shady white men, would inevitably blow off their sorry behinds. It was political comfort food.”

–Andrea Peyser, film critic, the New York Post.