I feel that this thread is incomplete without some of the wisdom of HRH Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh :
1. When visiting China in 1986, he told a group of British students, "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed".
2. After accepting a gift from a Kenyan native he replied, "You ARE a woman, aren't you?"
3. "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." (At a 1986 World Wildlife Fund meeting)
4. "British women can't cook." (1966)
5. To a British student in Papua New Guinea: "You managed not to get eaten then?"
6. Asked of a Scottish driving instructor, "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough for them to pass the driving test?"
7. On a visit to the new Welsh Assembly in Cardiff, he told a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, "Deaf? No wonder you are deaf standing so close to that racket.
8. Asked of an Australian Aborigine, "Still throwing spears?" (March 2002)
9. To a Briton in Budapest, "You can't have been here that long you haven't got a pot belly." (1993)
10. To the President of Nigeria (dressed in traditional Muslim robes), "You look like you're ready for bed!"
11. On seeing a shoddily installed fuse box in a high-tech Edinburgh factory, he remarked "It looks as if it was put in by an Indian".
12. A twelve year-old boy told the Prince that he wanted to be an astronaut, Prince Philip replied, "You could do with losing a bit of weight."."
13. On an extended tour of the Royal Navy ship HMS Boxer, was quoted to have said, "Not another ***ing chamber".
14. After meeting San Francisco mayor, of the time, Dianne Feinstein and several female supervisors, he remarked, "Aren't there any male officials?... This is a nanny city." (1983)
15. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" (in 1994, to an islander in the Cayman Islands)
16. "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed." (during the 1981 recession)
17. "We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right? Are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it." (commenting in 1995 on modern stress counselling for servicemen)
18. "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?" (in 1996, amid calls to ban firearms after the Dunblane shooting)
19. "They must be out of their minds." (in 1982, in the Solomon Islands, after being told that the annual population growth was only 5%)
20. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species in the world." (in 1991, in Thailand, after accepting a conservation award).
21. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." (in 1992 in Australia, when asked to stroke a Koala bear)
22. "Bloody silly fool!" (in 1997, referring to a Cambridge University car park attendant who failed to recognise him).
23. In 1998, to pupils at Queen Anne's School in Berkshire, who wear blood-red uniforms: "It makes you all look like Dracula's daughters."
24. Reputed to have said, after being informed of Tony Blairs re-election in May 2005, Well bugger me with a Ragmans Trumpet.
Maybe this is one of the reasons the UK is pretty much despised across the globe - well either that or post-imperialistic resentment.
