10 Most Profound Doctor Who Quotes

The idea of importance is batted around a fair bit by the Doctor, but we’re choosing the quote from A Christmas Carol here.

The Doctor finds himself on the planet Ember, tasked with finding a way of saving Amy and Rory from a volatile storm belt controlled by local loanshark and total a***hole, Kazran Sardick (wonderfully portrayed by Michael Gambon). He finds himself interrupting Sardick as he ransoms a cryogenically frozen girl to her family, extorting them for money. After flapping his hands about a bit and confirming Santa’s name is Jeff, The Doctor's attention falls on the popsicle girl, Abigail. He asks who the girl is, to which Sardick replies that she’s nobody important. The Doctor’s clap-back has become one of his most iconic lines:

"Nobody important? Blimey, that's amazing. You know that in nine hundred years of time and space I've never met anybody who wasn't important before."

This almost feels like a direct response to Ten’s controversial temper tantrum in The End of Time, in which he suggests that Wilfred Mott is not remotely important - a crime which, in my view, should be punishable by death and I have never truly forgiven Ten for. This fixation on importance in the RTD era (after all, Donna was the most important person in all of creation, and before that, according to Ten, she wasn't important at all) clearly didn’t sit right with Moffat, and he challenged this idea as early as his first episode: The Eleventh Hour, during The Doctor’s rooftop standoff with the Atraxi. Unfortunately, Moff would later go on to undo some of this with his attempts to make Clara the definitive, all-time most important companion, but that’s by the by.

This quote is iconic for a reason. It speaks to the value of everyone as an individual: a reminder that no one is insignificant, even if they believe themselves to be. They have value, and someone somewhere is looking out for them.