To start with, we go back to Boxing Day 1964 and the final episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The Doctor realises that his granddaughter Susan has fallen for a human named David, and locks her out of the Tardis saying that with David, she finally has a chance to forge her own path.
Then, he drops a quote that makes even the toughest Whovians well up: “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.” A lot of iconic Doctor Who quotations are about persevering through life and this was the first one to go down in the show’s history as an all-time classic.
The era of the Fourth Doctor is littered with fantastic lines, delivered with booming gusto by the legend that is Tom Baker. However, two stick out to me as important in the current age of politics: in the underrated story The Face of Evil, Baker espouses “the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views.” If that is a very pertinent fact, then another quote where he says “You're a classic example of the inverse relationship between the size of the mouth and the size of the brain” is the ultimate insult.
And the final pick from classic Who has to be the final line from 1989’s Survival, the last story before a 15-year hiatus. When the crew realised the show probably wouldn’t be back for a while, they got Sylvester McCoy to record this phenomenal voiceover: ‘There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. The seas asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on Ace, we’ve got work to do.”
As for the show in the 21st century though… I don’t even know where to start. There’s just memorable quote after memorable quote. There’s some phenomenal speeches in New Who - the Akhaten speech, how many seconds in eternity, the plea to the Zygons. However, my favourite one to quote (especially when I’ve had a few) is the Eleventh Doctor’s speech to all the monsters gathering around Stonehenge. Very few things get me as hyped up as when Matt Smith yells at all the spaceships to remember “every black day I ever stopped you!”
I’m acting like I don’t know all these quotes off by heart, but Doctor Who really has a quote for every situation. Whether it’s about the fun of travelling, the Doctor’s dark side, or sound advice about life, I’ve always ended up slipping a Doctor Who line into my day. But now, I’ll leave you with the best Doctor Who line of all time: when the Twelfth Doctor introduces Clara in Into the Dalek, he says “She’s my carer. She cares, so I don’t have to.”