Unquote

“I remember Tallulah [Bankhead] telling of going into a public ladies’ room and discovering there was no toilet tissue. She looked underneath the booth and said to the lady in the next stall, ‘I beg your pardon, do you happen to have any toilet tissue in there?’ The lady said no. So Tallulah said, ‘Well, then, dahling, do you have two fives for a ten?'” — Ethel Merman

| Entertainment · Quotations

“British Women Can’t Cook”

Controversial remarks attributed to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh:

  • “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.”
  • When visiting China in 1986, he told a group of British students, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
  • To a British student in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
  • To a Scottish driving instructor: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough for them to pass the driving test?”
  • 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.”
  • To an Australian aborigine: “Still throwing spears?”
  • To the president of Nigeria, who was dressed in traditional Muslim robes: “You look like you’re ready for bed.”
  • Seeing a poorly installed fusebox in an Edinburgh factory, Philip said it looked “like it was put in by an Indian.”
  • When a 12-year-old boy told the prince that he aspired to be an astronaut, he replied, “You’re too fat.”

Overheard during an extended tour of HMS Boxer: “Not another fucking chamber.”

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