- [to an Australian Aborigine] Do you still throw spears at each other?
- British women can't cook.
- [at the 1986 World Wildlife Fund conference] If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.
- The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined.
- [on the U.S. Apollo program] It seems to me that it's the best way of wasting money that I know of. I don't think investments on the moon pay a very high dividend.
- [in 1981, in reference to an economic recession] Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.
- [to a group of British students in China] If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed.
- [In a 1966 conversation with the matron of a hospital while on a tour of the Caribbean] You have mosquitoes. I have the press.
- I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist . . . I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.
- [to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary] You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly.
- [to an inhabitant of the Cayman Islands] Aren't most of you descended from pirates?
- [to a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band] Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.
- A gun is no more dangerous than a cricket bat in the hands of a madman.
- [after accepting a gift from a Kenyan woman] You are a woman, aren't you?
- [on a visit to Lockerbie in 1993 to a man who lived in a road where eleven people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet] People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle.
- [asked of a driving instructor in Scotland] How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?
- [to a British student in Papua New Guinea] You managed not to get eaten then?
- [to a blind, wheelchair-bound woman who was accompanied by her guide dog] Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?
- [of a fuse box, whilst on a tour of a factory in Edinburgh, Scotland] It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.
- [to a Mr. Patel--a common Indian surname--at a reception for 400 British Indian businessmen at Buckingham Palace] There's a lot of your family in tonight.
- [when informed that a student was going to help out in Romania for six months, he asked if the student was going to help the Romanian orphans and was told that he was not] Ah good, there's so many over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages.
- [to Barack Obama after being told that Obama had met with the Chinese and Russian ambassadors along with David Cameron] How can you tell the difference between them?
- [to a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut, who was wishing to fly the NOVA rocket] Well, you'll never fly in it, you're too fat to be an astronaut.
- [on learning that his children would be named Windsor, not Mountbatten] I'm just a bloody amoeba.
- [on inaugurating a display, Canada 1969] I declare this thing open, whatever it is.
- When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.
- [to an industrial association, during a national production lull] Gentlemen, I think it is time we pulled our fingers out.
- [in 2011, approaching his 90th birthday] Bits are beginning to drop off.
- I was dazzled by the Sun.
- I would like to go to Russia very much - although the bastards murdered half my family.
- People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans.
- Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy.
- [on Princess Anne] If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested.
- I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress. [Said during ceremony in honor of his mother Princess Alice where she was declared Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews during the Holocaust.]
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