TV show quotes
[Hacker has just requested a goodwill visit to St George's Island.]
He [the defence secretary] seemed to think 800 fully armed paratroopers was an awful lot to send on a goodwill visit.
No, it is just an awful lot of goodwill!
Oh, this is nice. The Americans are delighted by our little visit to St. George's Island. That's good, isn't it?
[resigned] Excellent.
They say they have got a whole airborne division ready if we want reinforcements.
[sharply] Reinforcements of what?
Reinforcements of goodwill, Humphrey!
What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
What's that?
Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
What if he demands options?
Well, it's obvious, Bernard. The Foreign Office will happily present him with three options, two of which are, on close inspection, exactly the same.
Plus a third which is totally unacceptable.
Like bombing Warsaw or invading France.
Bishops tend to have long lives. Apparently the Lord isn't all that keen to let them join him.
In such an awful country, they cut people's hands off and women get stoned when they commit adultery.
Unlike Britain, where they commit adultery when they get stoned.
Soames has been waiting for a bishopric for years.
Long time, no see.
It's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it: I have an independent mind; you are an eccentric; he is round the twist.
See also emotive conjugation for Bertrand Russell's original 1948 version.
[Sir Humphrey is suspected of having once been a Russian spy.]
So what do you think I should do, Arnold?
[calmly pours his coffee] Hmm, difficult. Depends a bit on whether you actually were spying or not. [notices Sir Humphrey's horrified expression] One must keep an open mind.
But I couldn't have been! I wasn't at Cambridge!
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.
Thousands.
It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other member’s recollection. Consequently, we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case, if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, and it isn’t, so it wasn’t.
That's another of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I give confidential press briefings; you leak; he's being charged under section 2A of the Official Secrets Act.
[Lunch with a newspaper editor]
So I want you to retract that suppression story.
I don't see how I can.
Well, of course you can! You're the editor, aren't you?
Yes, but an editor isn't like a general commanding an army; he's just the ringmaster of a circus. I mean I can book the acts, but I can't tell the acrobats which way to jump!
Gratitude is merely a lively expectation of favours to come.
Reference to François de La Rochefoucauld
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