Yes, Minister

[HawkerHurricane]

"The public doesn’t know anything about wasting government money, we're the experts." - Sir Humphrey

Bernard Woolley: "Well, yes, Sir...I mean, it is the Minister's policy after all."
Sir Arnold: "My dear boy, it is a contradiction in terms: you can be open or you can have government."

Jim Hacker: "Humphrey, do you see it as part of your job to help Ministers make fools of themselves?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, I never met one that needed any help."

Sir Humphrey: "Bernard, Ministers should never know more than they need to know. Then they can't tell anyone. Like secret agents, they could be captured and tortured."
Bernard: "You mean by terrorists?"
Sir Humphrey: "By the BBC, Bernard."

Sir Humphrey: "Minister, I think there is something you perhaps ought to know."
Jim Hacker: "Yes Humphrey?"
Sir Humphrey: "The identity of the Official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion, is NOT shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom you present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun."
Jim Hacker: "I beg your pardon?"
Sir Humphrey: "It was...I."

Sir Humphrey: "If local authorities don't send us the statistics that we ask for, than government figures will be a nonsense."
Jim Hacker: "Why?"
Sir Humphrey: "They will be incomplete."
Jim Hacker: "But government figures are a nonsense anyway."
Bernard Woolley: "I think Sir Humphrey want to ensure they are a complete nonsense."


Sir Humphrey: "The Foreign Office takes the view that as the Arab nations are a very sensitive people that we should show them who's side we're on."
Jim Hacker: "Well it may come as a surprise to the Foreign Office, but you are supposed to be on our side."

Jim Hacker: "Nothing wrong with subsidizing sports: sport is educational."
Sir Humphrey: "We have sex education too. Should we subsidize sex perhaps?"
Bernard Woolley: "Could we?"

Jim Hacker: "As far as world politics goes, of course the Foreign Office is just an irrelevance. We have no real power, we are just a sort of American missile base."