Nigel Hawthorne credited as playing...
Sir Humphrey Appleby
- Bernard Woolley: It makes me feel rather downcast. If it's our job to implement Government Policies, shouldn't we believe in them?
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: What an extraordinary thing to say.
- Bernard Woolley: Why?
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Bernard, I have served 11 Governments in the last 30 years, if I believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately commited to keeping out of the Common Market and passionately committed to going into it, I would've been utterly convinced of the rightness of Nationalising Steel, and of denationalising it, and renationalising it. On Capital Punishment I would have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent Abolitionist, I would have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a Grammar School Destroyer and Preserver, a Nationalisation Freak and a Privatisation Maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving Schizophrenic!
- Hacker: They have the right to know!
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: No, they have the right to be ignorant. Knowledge implies complicity, ignorance has a certain Dignity.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: He who would keep a secret must keep it a secret that he hath a secret to keep.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: If you're going to do this damn silly thing, don't do it in this damn silly way.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: [Talking about Government reports] it could be argued that the Sermon on the Mount, were it a government report, would never have been published.
- [pauses]
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: All that nonsense about the meek inheriting the Earth.
- [pauses]
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: It could do irreparable damage to the defence budget!
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: The Prime Minister Giveth, and the Prime Minister Taketh Away. Blessed be the Name of the Prime Minister...
- Education Campaigner: Children should be taught the Facts of Life in Class, but not Homosexual Technique!
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Well, where should they learn that?
- Education Campaigner: Behind the Bike Sheds, like I did!