Oh! that desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her!

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza177.

I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

-Churchill, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer
  Speech at the Mansion House, London,10 Nov.

My Minister's room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great, vast room, cut off from real life.Of course they don't behave quite like nurses, because the Civil Service is profoundly deferentialö'Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!'

-Crossman, Richard Howard Stafford
  The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol.1 (1975), 22 Oct.

'What a wonderful boy he is!'said my mother. 'I'm feared he turn out to be a conceited gowk,'said old Barnet, the minister's man.

-Hogg,James
  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

If some of my former colleagues are to be believed, I must be the first minister in history to have resigned because he was in full agreement with government policy.

-Howe, Baron
  Personal statement on his resignation, House of Commons,13 Nov.

Say quotes from the shortstop or the Prime Minister, but quotations from the Bible, Browning or Churchill.

-McFarlane,J A, and Clements,Warren
  The Globe and Mail Style Book.

Give me the liberty of the Press, and I will give the Minister a venal House of Peers, I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons†armedwiththeliberty of the Press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed.

-Sheridan, Richard Brinsley
  Speech, House of Commons.

As a Minister, it is my policy to keep all the nationalities within the Habsburg monarchy in a balanced state of well-modulated dissatisfaction.

-Taaffe, Eduard FranzJosef, Graf von
Letters.

I have lived long enough in the world to know that the safety of a Minister lies in his having the approbation of this House.Former Ministers neglected that and thereforethey fell; I have always made it my first study to obtain it, and therefore I hope to stand.

-Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl of Orford
  Speech, House of Commons, 21 Nov.

The Minister said it wald dee, the cypress-buss I plantit. But the buss grew til a tree, naething dauntit. It's growan, stark and heich, derk and straucht and sinister, kirkyairdielike and dreich. But whaur's the Minister?

-Young, Douglas
  Auntran Blads,'Last Lauch'.