“Family does not necessarily mean blood relatives but often a description of a community, organisation or nation.”

They are not royal. They just happen to have me as their aunt.

I don’t like to badmouth people. But I’m the head of a monarchy that began in the ninth century, and I’m apparently more modern than Chris Christie.

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.

These wretched babies don’t come until they are ready.

It is as queen of Canada that I am here. Queen of Canada and all Canadians, not just one or two ancestral strains.

For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.

Think what we would have missed if we had never … used a mobile phone or surfed the Net — or, to be honest, listened to other people talking about surfing the Net.

In the turbulence of this anxious and active world many people are leading uneventful, lonely lives. To them dreariness, not disaster, is the enemy.

[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

When life seems hard, the courageous do not lie down and accept defeat; instead, they are all the more determined to struggle for a better future.

It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all.

I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

[On the 1982 intruder into her bedroom:] I realized immediately that it wasn’t a servant because they don’t slam doors.

It has turned out to be an annus horribilis.

If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture.

You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But, if you want to be a movie star, you’ve got a tough road ahead of you.

Developing wisdom in community is to constantly learn and relearn that expedience in the short term.

In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves.

Nothing is more devastating to a community than out-of-control crime.

We don’t have any real sense of community anymore.

For at least the past 65 years, liberalism has been nothing if not an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals, between the need for freedom and the need for order.

It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.