Sir Humphrey, he's very worried that he seems responsible for something that he can't change.
Yes, I'm sure. Responsibility without power: the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
S2 E7The National Education Service
I think education is extremely important. It could lose me the next election.
Ah! In my naivety, I thought you were concerned about the future of our children.
Yes, that too. After all, they get the vote at 18.
[reading from a list of quiz questions] Maths has become politicized - "If it costs 5 billion pounds a year to maintain Britain's nuclear defenses, and 75 pounds a year to feed a starving African child, how many African children could be saved from starvation if the Ministry of Defense abandoned nuclear weapons?"
That's easy, none. They'd spend it all on conventional weapons.
Education in this country is a disaster. We're supposed to be preparing children for a working life. Three-quarters of the time, they're bored stiff!
Well, I should have thought that being bored stiff for three-quarters of the time was an excellent preparation for working life.
The school leaving age was raised to 16 so they could learn more, and they're learning less.
We didn't raise it to enable them to learn more, we raised it to keep teenagers off the job market and hold down the unemployment figures.
Are you saying there's nothing wrong with education in this country?
No, of course not Prime Minister, it's a joke! It's always been a joke! And as long as your leave it in the hands of the local councillors, it will remain a joke. I mean, half of them are your enemies anyway, and the other half are the sort of friends who make you prefer your enemies.
Well, what are you saying?
I'm saying that education will never get any better as long as it's subject to all that tomfoolery in the town halls. I mean, just imagine what would happen if you put defense in the hands of the local authorities.
Defense?
Yes, give the local councils 100 million each and ask them to defend themselves. We wouldn't have to worry about the Russians, we'd have a civil war in three weeks!
Better than Channel 4 coverage. They didn't describe it as the PM's tour of the north-west. They said, "Jim Hacker touring the marginal constituencies."
AAnnie
That's true, isn't it?
But they shouldn't say it. It's biased reporting!
AAnnie
Reporting the facts?
Nothing wrong with visiting the marginals.
AAnnie
What they said was still true.
It was still biased to say it!
S2 E8The Tangled Web
[The Prime Minister believes that he gave a clear, simple, straightforward and honest answer.]
Unfortunately, although the answer was indeed clear, simple, and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated and the facts, insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated, is such as to cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear.
Epistemological — what are you talking about?
You told a lie.
A lie?
A lie.
What do you mean, a lie?
I mean you… lied. Yes, I know this is a difficult concept to get across to a politician. You… ah yes, you did not tell the truth.
You mean we are bugging Hugh Halifax's telephones?
We were.
We were? When did we stop?
[checks his watch] Seventeen minutes ago.
The fact that you needed to know was not known at the time that the now known need to know was known, and therefore those that needed to advise and inform the Home Secretary perhaps felt that the information that he needed as to whether to inform the highest authority of the known information was not yet known, and therefore there was no authority for the authority to be informed because the need to know was not, at that time, known or needed.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Yes, Prime Minister pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.