Quotes about Queen Victoria

21 Sourced Quotes

Napoleon, who had an aversion to the moral laxity of the eighteenth century, which he blamed on the domination of society by women, was determined to reform family life on Roman, or perhaps rather on Corsican, principles. It was with him, not with Queen Victoria, that Victorian morality originated.

J. Christopher Herold

More attention should have been given to the fundamental transformation which took place during Queen Victoria's reign, from ruling sovereign to constitutional monarch. Again, gender mattered. If Albert had lived, it seems clear that he would have resisted that development much more tenaciously, which the gradual emasculation (and feminization) of monarchy was probably more easily accomplished when a woman was on the throne.

David Cannadine

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

Failure? Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? 'Failure? – the possibilities do not exist.'

Margaret Thatcher

Anna Neagle playing Queen Victoria always made me think that Albert must have married beneath him.

Only those of us, I think, who were born under Queen Victoria know what it feels like to assume, without questioning, that England is permanently top nation, that foreigners do not matter, and that if the worst comes to the worst, Lord Salisbury will send a gunboat.

Queen Victoria: I thought gags were things that were put by authority into people's mouths.
D'Oyly Carte: These gags, your Majesty, are things that people put into their own mouths without authority

Richard D'Oyly Carte

Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.
He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme
A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.

I have often thought that i am the most clever woman that ever lived, and others cannot compare with me.... Although I have heard much about Queen Victoria... I don't think her life was half so interesting and eventful as mine.... she had... really nothing to say about the policy of the country. Now look at me. I have 400,000,000 people dependent on my judgement.

Empress Dowager Cixi

He moved away to the next picture. It was of a man with a fat smiley face and a red ribbon round him and a lot of medals. My great uncle Ambrose Fudge said Bernard carelessly.
He looks a thorough ancestor said Ethel kindly.
Well he was said Bernard in a proud tone he was really the Sinister son of Queen Victoria.
Not really cried Ethel in excited tones but what does that mean.
Well I don't quite know said Bernard Clark it puzzles me very much but ancestors do turn queer at times.

In response to a member of the royal staff who had wondered if Queen Victoria would be happy in heaven:

She will have to walk behind the angels — and she won't like that.

You ask about Queen Victoria's visit to Brussels. I saw her for an instant flashing through the Rue Royale in a carriage and six, surrounded by soldiers. She was laughing and talking very gaily. She looked a little stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her. The Belgians liked her very well on the whole. They said she enlivened the sombre court of King Leopold, which is usually as gloomy as a conventicle.

Charlotte Brontë

Queen Victoria was loyal and true to the Pope; that is what I was told, and so is Edward the Seventh loyal and true, but he has got something contrary in his body.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

Queen Victoria was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat upon men's minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow all over the place haphazardly.

To an archbishop after the service of celebration for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee:

I have no objection whatsoever to the notion of the Eternal Father, but every objection to the concept of an eternal mother.

"You would now be an enemy, in the third class, of my own organization."
"Only third class?" I asked in the indignant tones which Queen Victoria surely used when she received the Abyssinian Order of Chastity, Second Class.

Kyril Bonfiglioli

I am a Democrat. All of my family have been persons of peasant origin, who have wrung a meagre sufficiency from a harsh world by the labour of their hands. I acknowledge no one my superior merely on grounds of a more fortunate destiny, a favoured birth. I did what any such man would do when confronted with Queen Victoria; I fell immediately to my knees.

Robertson Davies

The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

Neal Stephenson

Of Queen Victoria and the future Edward VII:

It is nice to trace how the actions of a retired widow and an unemployed youth become of such importance.

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

To the young Queen Victoria on why he refused to read Oliver Twist:

It's all among workhouses and Coffin Makers and Pickpockets… I wish to avoid them.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne