第五集

Humpy: Formulating policy means making choices. Once you do that, you please the people that you favour, but infuriate everybody else. One vote gained, ten lost. If you give the job to the road services, the rail board and unions will scream. Give it to the railways, the road lobby will massacre you. Cut British Airways investment plans, they'll hold a devastating press conference that same day.

第六集

"You are a moral vacuum!"

Bernard: I was just wondering if the minster was right (...) about ends and means. (...) If it's our job to carry out government policies, shouldn't we believe in them?

Humpy: 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.

(...) The investigation of a trivial break-in led to one ghastly revelation after another and finally the downfall of a president. The golden rule is don't lift lids off cans of worms. Everything is connected to everything else.

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Vic: Either you're in the arms business or you're not!

Jim: If being in it meaning arming murders, terrorists, then we should be out. It's immoral.

Vic: Great! Is it moral to put 100000 workers out of a job? And exports, 2 billion a year gone, for starters. What about the votes? Where do you think the government places all those weapon contracts?

Jim: In marginal constituencies. (...) Sorry Vic, but there is such thing as duty, sometimes obe must follow one's conscience.

Vic: Have you no conscience for the survival of the government? Can't you see it's essential to deal with major policies rather than a few arms exporters and terrorists? (你不明白维护大政方针比出口重要得多？)