- Hilda Rumpole: [as Rumpole enters their home] Is that you, Rumpole?
- Horace Rumpole: [Sarcastically] Good heavens, no, it's the Lord High Chancellor popped in to read the gas meter.
- Horace Rumpole: [to himself] A fair judge, an upright judge - always a terrible danger to the defence!
- Horace Rumpole: [In an impassioned defence of Uncle Tom] It's like great poetry - that's unnecessary. You can't eat it. It doesn't make you money. I suppose, there are some people, Ballard, who can get through life like you - without Wordsworth's sonnet "Upon Westminster Bridge". What we're discussing here is the quality of life. Uncle Tom adds an imaginative tone to what would otherwise be a dusty, dreary little clerks' office full of barristers, biscuits, and briefs.
- Samuel Ballard Q.C.: Uncle Tom and his golf balls are, in my considered opinion, a quite unnecessary health hazard. I'm asking him to vacate his rooms.
- Horace Rumpole: [horrified] You're going to ask him to leave?
- Samuel Ballard Q.C.: Exactly that.
- Horace Rumpole: [standing up] If Uncle Tom goes, I go.
- Samuel Ballard Q.C.: That would seem to make the departure of Uncle Tom even *more* desirable.