Top 50 Martin Sheen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Irish tell the story of a man who arrives at the gates of heaven and asks to be let in St. Peter says, “Of course, just show us your scars.” The man says, “I have no scars”. St. Peter says, “What a pity was there nothing worth fighting for”?”

— Martin Sheen

2. “Oh you only fight the fights you can win? You fight the fights that need fighting!”

— Martin Sheen

3. “Find something in your life worth fighting for.”

— Martin Sheen

4. “If you are on an honest journey to find yourself, you’ll find God.”

— Martin Sheen

5. “We are not asked to do great things. We are asked to do all things with great care.”

— Martin Sheen

6. “Stop going for the easy buck and start producing something with your life. Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”

— Martin Sheen

7. “No matter what is going on, everything is grace.”

— Martin Sheen

8. “My recovery is the single greatest accomplishment of my life. Without that, the rest of my life would have fallen apart.”

— Martin Sheen

9. “Golf is fundamentally about being honest. I see people hit eight shots and tell me they shot five. I never say a word. It is a reminder to me of what is at stake.”

— Martin Sheen

10. “Money’s only something you need in case you don’t die tomorrow.”

— Martin Sheen

11. “I love my country enough to suffer its wrath.”

— Martin Sheen

12. “I think service to others is the real key to winning our own personal freedom and the road to our own happiness, our own personal contentment and fulfillment.”

— Martin Sheen

13. “I’m one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.”

— Martin Sheen

14. “Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting.”

— Martin Sheen

15. “I love The West Wing for many reasons. The show has been a fantasy. But we have offered a parallel universe to reality.”

— Martin Sheen

16. “The line between spontaneity and stupidity can be very thin.”

— Martin Sheen

17. “No father could ever be prouder of his son. I hold Charlie’s accomplishments dearer than my own. He has been through so much and overcome so much more. Even if he weren’t my son he’d still be my best friend.”

— Martin Sheen

18. “We wind up in cells of our own making when we’re not generous, loving, compassionate, and forgiving. Without love, we build dungeons in our hearts and fill them with our perceived enemies.”

— Martin Sheen

19. “You do it for yourself. You don’t expect to change the world. You don’t even expect to influence your family or your friends. You do it because you can’t not do it and be who you are. Or who you’re meant to be.”

— Martin Sheen

20. “I don’t like scary films. I watched Psycho for the first time recently, alone in the house at night. That was a mistake. I had to call my friend to come over.”

— Martin Sheen

21. “I still believe in the nonviolent Jesus and the basic human goodness present in all of us.”

— Martin Sheen

22. “I sincerely believe that everything – everything – is grace, and you have to stick around long enough to see it through. I’m a very optimistic person.”

— Martin Sheen

23. “Nothing ever gets done unless it’s done by a fanatic.”

— Martin Sheen

24. “While acting is what I do for a living, activism is what I do to stay alive.”

— Martin Sheen

25. “I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it.”

— Martin Sheen

26. “I just think that the only way we come to ourselves is through each other.”

— Martin Sheen

27. “Those years on the golf course as a caddie, boy, those people were something. They were vulgar, some were alcoholics, racist, they were very difficult people to deal with. A lot of them didn’t have a sense of humor.”

— Martin Sheen

28. “I have been accused of being a traitor, and I have been accused of not supporting the military. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

— Martin Sheen

29. “Jim Dean and Elvis were the spokesmen for an entire generation. When I was in acting school in New York, years ago, there was a saying that if Marlon Brando changed the way people acted, then James Dean changed the way people lived. He was the greatest actor who ever lived. He was simply a genius.”

— Martin Sheen

30. “People, although having their own cross to carry, can minister to others through their own pain.”

— Martin Sheen

31. “We have to fight for something. It has to cost us. Our lives, our faith, have to cost us something; otherwise we’re left to question its value.”

— Martin Sheen

32. “I act because I can’t seem to live with myself if I do not. I don’t know any other way to be. It isn’t something you can explain; it is just something that you do; it is something that you are.”

— Martin Sheen

33. “I think the Church is a conduit to God. The Church is not God. And I think that from the very beginning Jesus taught us that.”

— Martin Sheen

34. “Just open your eyes! I thought. These desperate poor are your gurus.”

— Martin Sheen

35. “The key word about The West Wing is show. It is not a reality show. It has nothing to do with reality.”

— Martin Sheen

36. “It doesn’t really matter how much of the rules or the dogma we accepted and lived by if we’re not really living by the fundamental creed of the Catholic Church, which is service to others and finding God in ourselves and then seeing God in everyone – including our enemies.”

— Martin Sheen

37. “On the show, we are not trying to get people to eat their vegetables; we are not trying to get people to become Democrats. We are basically trying to encourage people to get involved with public life so that politics isn’t left to the wealthy and privileged.”

— Martin Sheen

38. “My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.”

— Martin Sheen

39. “The first world is going to have to account for this sort of horrible poverty in our midst. We have to, first of all, become aware of it. We have to take responsibility for it. And then we have to do something about it for our own freedom, for our own salvation, for our own humanity.”

— Martin Sheen

40. “I am a very conscientious golfer. I count every stroke. I learned to play that way. That is the only way I can play. It taught me to be honest. There is no greater virtue than honesty.”

— Martin Sheen

41. “And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We’re so self-focused.”

— Martin Sheen

42. “George W Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if youll pardon the expression.”

— Martin Sheen

43. “I am not the President. Instead, I hold an even higher office, that of citizen of the United States.”

— Martin Sheen

44. “Anybody who plays golf will tell you that you play against yourself.”

— Martin Sheen

45. “When an actor reaches down into his emotional well and pulls up a deeply personal response, the audience can sense something special is going on. They may not know exactly what they’re seeing, but they recognize it as authentic.”

— Martin Sheen

46. “We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out.”

— Martin Sheen

47. “Kids don’t always stop to judge or analyze a new experience unless the adults around them react strongly. Otherwise, they just take in the experience and move on to the next one.”

— Martin Sheen

48. “I am still a journeyman actor and a peace and justice activist. I’m a pilgrim trying to win my freedom and serve as best I can in the time I have, with this gift I’ve been given.”

— Martin Sheen

49. “I became an actor because it was my clumsy attempt to become myself.”

— Martin Sheen

50. “I don’t think that people in America are really given enough information about the Third World.”

— Martin Sheen