(From Yes, Minister: "The Whiskey Priest")












Sir Humphrey: "When you see vast buildings, huge staff and massive budgets, what do you conclude?"
Jim Hacker: "Bureaucracy?"


Minister Jim Hacker: Oh I see, what is it about then?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stability. Keeping things going. Preventing anarchy. Stopping society falling to bits. Still being here tomorrow.
[]
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Minister, government isn’t about good and evil, it is only about order or chaos.


Sir Humphrey Appleby: What's the matter, Bernard?
Bernard Woolley: Oh nothing really, Sir Humphrey.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: You look unhappy.
Bernard Woolley: Well, I was just wondering if the minister was right, actually.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Very unlikely. What about?
Bernard Woolley: About ends and means. I mean, will I end up as a moral vacuum too?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Oh, I hope so, Bernard. If you work hard enough.
Bernard Woolley: I actually feel rather downcast. If it's our job to carry out government policies, shouldn't we believe in them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Huh, what an extraordinary idea.
Bernard Woolley: Why?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist. I would've 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.