Prince Phillip Quotes

As spoken at a 1986 World Wildlife Fund meeting:

“If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”

During a visit to the new Welsh Assembly, while he was with a group from the British Deaf Association who were standing near a band, he pointed to the musicians and said:

"Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf." 

To a Briton he met in Hungary in 1993:      

"You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly".

In 1995 he asked a Scottish driving instructor:                                                     

"How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test." 

The Prince angered local residents in Lockerbie when on a visit to the town in 1993, he said to a man who lived in a road where 11 people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo:                                                                                                                                                     

"People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle."

During a Royal visit to China in 1986 he described Peking as "ghastly" and told British students: 

"If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed."

At the height of the recession in 1981 he said:                                                                                     

"Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."

In 1966 he provoked outrage by saying:                                                                                              

"British women can't cook."

In 1969 The Duke said to Tom Jones after the Royal Variety Performance:                           

"What do you gargle with, pebbles?".

On the tragic Dunblane shootings:                                                                                             

“I sympathize desperately with the people who were bereaved at Dunblane, but I'm not altogether convinced that it's the best system to somehow shift the blame onto a very large, peaceable part of the community. If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily ... I mean are you going to ban cricket bats?"

To an Australian Aborigine during a visit in March 2002:                                             

"Still throwing spears?"

Sharing a joke with a blind, wheelchair-bound girl with a guide-dog:                                   

"Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?"

Referring to an old-fashioned fusebox in a factory near Edinburgh in 1999:                      

"It looks as if it was put in by an Indian."

Speaking to an islander in the Cayman Islands in 1994:                                                          

"Aren't most of you descended from pirates?"

Speaking to a student who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea:                                 

"You managed not to get eaten then?"

Pointing at 14-year-old Shahin Ullah during a visit to a London youth club:                         

"He looks as if he is on drugs!"

In 2001 he told a 13-year-old schoolboy he was 'too fat' to become an astronaut.

More recently he joked that the answer to London's traffic congestion was to 'ban tourists'.

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