Diamond Jubilee Quotes

Here we are on top of the world. We have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, this thing called history. But history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. —Arnold Toynbee, recalling the 1897 diamond jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria   Like other practicing historians, I am often asked what the “lessons of history” are. I answer that the only lesson I have learnt from studying the past is that there are no permanent winners and losers. —Ramachandra Guha

In an era when the regular worthy rhythm of life is less eye-catching than doing something extraordinary, I am reassured that I am merely the second sovereign to celebrate a diamond jubilee.

What infuriated many observers was that everything had changed and nothing had changed. That in fact seems to be the nature of English life. It was a revolution which had not changed the nature of governance.

Diamond Jubilee with him for extra contrition. Her father was clearly exhausted, sleeping almost all the time now, like an aged dog. Why didn’t he just go? Was he hanging on for a hundred? Two more years of this? It was mere existence—an amoeba had more life. “The triumph of the human spirit,” the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about “positive outcomes” and “enhancement programmes”—emollient management-speak, meaningless to most of the residents of Poplar Hill, who were either dying or demented or both. It was called a “care home” but there was precious little of either to be had when you were run by a profit-based health-care provider employing

One first celebrates a ‘silver jubilee’, then a ‘golden jubilee’, then a ‘diamond jubilee’, but even then he goes back again into a pile of wood (cremation).

For however decisive the Bolsheviks’ victory had been over the privileged classes on behalf of the Proletariat, they would be having banquets soon enough. Perhaps there would not be as many as there had been under the Romanovs – no autumn dances or diamond jubilees – but they were bound to celebrate something, whether the centennial of Das Kapital or the silver anniversary of Lenin’s beard. Guest lists would be drawn up and shortened. Invitations would be engraved and delivered. Then, having gathered around a grand circle of tables, the new statesmen would nod their heads in order to indicate to a waiter (without interrupting the long-winded fellow on his feet) that, yes, they would have a few more spears of asparagus.

1912, the year of Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, elevating

We don’t know in what state we shall meet again; but that we shall recognize each other and be together in eternity I am perfectly certain.

Joy Seekers Certainly, every one of you will admit that what we seek in life is peace and joy. The way of seeking and the field in which we are seeking may be different from man to man, from place to place, and from era to era. But all of us are demanding the same joy everywhere and at all times. Joy or peace, as generally understood, is that which we experience when, in the external circumstances, we come to live a pattern which we have demanded for ourselves at a given period of time and place. That which was, in our childhood, a great happiness and joy, may not again provide for us an equal happiness or peace in our youth. A blue glass marble or a tennis ball would have been a joyous present when one was in one’s childhood. But the same present would not bring any happiness to us if it is presented to us at our diamond jubilee; conversely, it may even be painful, inasmuch as it would remind us of our old age and the impending ‘calamitous day’! Examples can be multiplied to justify the working definition of joy or peace that we have made just now. In this, the difficulty or the failure of man is mainly because the demand of the physical man is not necessarily the demand of the emotional; in the same individual the intellectual personality would still have a third type of demand and, perhaps, the spiritual seeker in him would have yet another demand. Thus, four distinct sets of demands are made by each individual at the same period of time and space. Certainly, no two happenings can come to pass at one and the same time and place, the happenings being conditioned by both time and place. Therefore, however much we may try to bring about, through certain new changes, a perfect scheme of things in our life and a hope to gain out of it a perfect satisfaction for all the four personalities in us, we shall only end up with sheer disappointment. Our Hope But, if there be a technique by which we can train, discipline and integrate all these wild and madly revolting personalities in us together into one unit, certainly, we can thereafter order much more freedom and happiness for ourselves in the outer world. These techniques are together termed as ‘religion’ by the great seers.

A family on the throne is an interesting idea,” Walter Bagehot wrote in 1867. “It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.” He warned, however, against too much exposure of the personal monarchy: “If you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it.… Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.

Not that she took to the usual ministrations that followed her husband’s death. When a cleric suggested to Victoria that “Henceforth you must remember that Christ Himself will be your husband,” the queen declared, “This is what I call twaddle!”73

Time cannot heal the wounds of the heart. Light minds might think it can, but there are [depths] which the years cannot fill, there are vacant places which can never be occupied … though the heart aches as it views the empty place, it would not have it filled by any save the one who owns it.

Individually, King Charles III has an average approval rating of 54 percent, well below that of his late mother, 76 percent, and William, at 64 percent. In 2023, outright support for the monarchy fell to 55 percent (down from 75 percent in 2012, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Year and the peak of Cambridge mania). Generationally, the differences are huge—79 percent of over-sixty-fives in Britain back the Crown, while just 36 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds want it to continue.