"Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving. The more you give — the more you will have!"

"Be generous! Give to those whom you love; give to those who love you; give to the fortunate; give to the unfortunate; yes — give especially to those to whom you don’t want to give."

"Happiness is having a loving, close knit family in another city."

"At my age, all my friends, doctors, and attorneys are dead. The good thing about this is that there's no one left who can refute my stories."

"If I paid $3 or $4 for a cigar, first I'd sleep with it."

"Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair."

"I've had worried parents come up to me and ask me for advice. They'll say "I don't know what to do. My teenage son won't cut his hair, he drives too fast, and I don't know what that stuff is he listens to, but it sure isn't music." I'll just say to them "I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. By the time he's my age, I don't think you'll need to worry about him anymore.""

"When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile."

"Wouldn't it be terrible if you'd spent all your life doing everything you were supposed to do, didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't eat things, took lots of exercise, all the things you didn't want to do, and suddenly one day you were run over by a big red bus, and as the wheels were crunching into you you'd say 'Oh my god, I could have got so drunk last night!' That's the way you should live your life, as if tomorrow you'll be run over by a big red bus."

"That is the most dangerous woman in Europe."

"I'll polish it off myself."

"We loved him."

"Whilst playing cards, Elizabeth: How are you getting on? You don't look very happy. Lord Salisbury: Oh, Ma'am, I've been left with a horrible queen. Elizabeth: I don't think that's a very good of way of putting it, do you?"

"Was this yours? Oh, could you take it?"

"Dear Edwina, she always liked to make a splash."

"But I love communists!"

"I wouldn't if I were you, Noël; they count them before they put them out."

"That's mine!"

"The children won't go without me. I won't leave the King. And the King will never leave."

"I am glad we have been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye."

"Tinkety tonk old fruit, and down with the Nazis."

"At the dinner table, the talk turned to politics. It was in the days before the 'Gang of Four' had allied themselves to the Liberal Party [early 1981]. Queen Elizabeth [The Queen Mother]: I dislike this new socialist party of Woy's [sic]. Host: They're called the Social Democrats, ma'am. Queen Elizabeth: Yes. Well, you don't change socialist just by leaving ist off the end. I say, it's a cheat to start something called the Social Party. I liked the old Labour Party. The best thing is a good old Tory government with a strong Labour opposition."

"Queen Elizabeth: I thought the girls . . . you see, they were marooned in Windsor Castle for most of the war, and I was not sure that they were having a very good education and kind Sachie and Osbert [Sitwell] said they would arrange a poetry evening for us. Such an embarrassment. Osbert was wonderful, as you would expect, and Edith, of course, but then we had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem . . . I think it was called "The Desert". And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the King. Self: "The Desert", ma'am? Are you sure it wasn't called "The Waste Land? Queen Elizabeth: That's it. I'm afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn't understand a word. Self: I believe he did once work in a bank."

"Never trust them, never trust them. They can't be trusted."

"He is the only man, since my dear husband died, to have had the effrontery to kiss me on the lips.”"

"We'd have to go self-service."

"We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time."

"Let us not foist this humbug on the world."

"All my moves were designed to promote the happiness and wellbeing of my family, rather than fame."

"I know that in my public life I fell below the standards that I had set myself... I have seen what is wrong but not done enough to put it right. I have been more critical than correct. I have had opportunities of great positions in the service of the state, but I have put them aside. I know that I have not devoted myself enough to promoting the good of others."

"I feel that I've had a happy life, not a very useful life, but a happy one."

"Getting up and criticising the other fellow because he's in and you are not seems to me a futile waste of time. Especially as you know in your heart that you would be doing more or less the same thing if you were in his place."

"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience."