Quote #24

Upon presenting a Duke of Edinburgh Award to a student, when informed that the young man was going to help out in Romania for six months, he asked if the student was going to help the Romanian orphans; upon being informed he was not, it was claimed the 85-year-old duke added: 'Ah good, there's so many over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages.'[7]

More from Duke of Edinburgh Philip

  1. At the height of the recession in 1981 he said: 'Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemploy…
  2. At the University of Salford, he told a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut: 'You could do with losing a bit of weight.'[8]
  3. 'Aren't most of you descended from pirates?' (in 1994, to an islander in the Cayman Islands)[1]
  4. In 1997, the Duke of Edinburgh, participating in an already controversial British visit to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre Monument, provoked…
  5. Seeing a shoddily installed fuse box in a high-tech Edinburgh factory, HRH remarked that it looked 'like it was put in by an Indian'.[5][6]
  6. During a Royal visit to a Tamil Hindu temple in London, he asked a Hindu priest if he was related to the terrorist organization the Tamil T…
  7. Said to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary, 'You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly.' (1993)[1]
  8. In 1996, he drew sharp criticism when he said 'a gun is no more dangerous than a cricket bat in the hands of a madman'. The comment came in…

All Duke of Edinburgh Philip quotes