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

I have to be seen to be believed.

They seldom realize that on their steadfastness, on their ability to withstand the fatigue of dull repetitive work, and on their courage in meeting constant small adversities depend in great measure the happiness and prosperity of the community as a whole. …

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.

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.

Before we can pray, “Lord, Thy Kingdom come,” we must be willing to pray, “My Kingdom go.”

I have this eerie feeling that by the time I’m 33, reality will not exist in the same plane as it did before.

Such lightening and thunder will come there has never been seen before, bringing death and destruction.

Like the idea that every night might be the night before the world ends.

In the immediate postwar era, financial crises in advanced countries were rare events, and before 1970 did not happen at all.

You will follow every mountain, sea and shore, You will see from far and near a world you’ve never seen before.

Why it banged, or what happened before it banged.

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly,