Some “Yes, Minister” quotes:
From the episode currently on BBC 2
Sir Humphrey: If local authorities don’t send us statistics, Government figures will be a nonsense.
Hacker: Why?
Sir Humphrey: They’ll be incomplete.
Hacker: Government figures are a nonsense, anyway.
Bernard: I think Sir Humphrey wants to ensure they’re a complete nonsense.
Others you might find distressingly funny:
Hacker: Are you saying that winking at corruption is government policy?
Sir Humphrey: No, no, Minister! It could never be government policy. That is unthinkable! Only government practice.
Hacker: You’re a cynic, Humphrey!
Sir Humphrey: A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.
Bernard: If it’s our job to carry out government policies, shouldn’t we believe in them?
Sir Humphrey: Oh, what an extraordinary idea! I have served 11 governments in the past 30 years. If I’d believed in all their policies, I’d have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to joining it. I’d have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel and of denationalising it and renationalising it. Capital punishment? I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I’d have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark-staring raving schizophrenic!
[The Home Secretary has been forced to resign after a drink-driving incident]
Hacker: What will happen to him?
Sir Humphrey: Well, I gather he was as drunk as a lord. So, after a discreet interval, they’ll probably make him one.
Sir Humphrey: How are things at the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, by the way?
Sir Arnold: Sorry, I can’t talk about that.
Sir Humphrey: It’s so difficult for me, you see, as I’m wearing two hats.
Hacker: Yes, isn’t that rather awkward for you?
Sir Humphrey: Not if one is in two minds.
Bernard: Or has two faces.
Sir Arnold: If once they accepted the principle that senior Civil Servants could be removed for incompetence, that would be the thin end of the wedge. We could lose dozens of our chaps. Hundreds, perhaps.
Sir Humphrey: Thousands.
Sir Humphrey: Bernard, if the right people don’t have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it: politicians, councillors, ordinary voters!
Bernard: But aren’t they supposed to, in a democracy?
Sir Humphrey: This is a British democracy, Bernard!
East Devon Watch 