What is wrong with people nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities? This is all to do with the learning culture in schools. It is a consequence of a child-centred education system which tells people they can become pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability. It is a result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically engineered to contradict the lessons of history.
Confidential memo written by Charles, March 2002
The 1960s
I was a teenager in the 1960s and remember witnessing what I realise now was a kind of cultural revolution which swept out the poor old baby with the bathwater.
Speech at the Prince of Wales Education summer school, October 4 2002
On 'organic' education
We live in a materialistic world which does not always fully appreciate the intrinsic importance of education - the balance between the heart and the mind; between, in other words, the "efficient", useful, "relevant" things and those now seen as "inefficient"; the ideas and inherited wisdom that make us truly human at the end of the day.
Speech at the third Prince of Wales Education summer school, June 25 2004
On plants
To get the best results, you must talk to your vegetables.
Quoted in the Observer, September 28 1986
On health
I would suggest that the whole imposing edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes, is, like the celebrated Tower of Pisa, slightly off balance. It is frightening how dependent upon drugs we are all becoming and how easy it is for doctors to prescribe them as the universal panacea for our ills.
Speech to the British Medical Association, December 14 1982
On allergies
We spend up to 80% of our time indoors, and the sealing of our houses to conserve heat and energy, the increase in soft furnishings and the rising numbers of pets all increase the chance of those genetically at risk becoming sensitised to domestic allergens such as dust mites, moulds, cats and dogs.
Article in the Guardian, February 28 2004
On fidelity
Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?
Quoted in the Daily Mail, December 1994
On architecture
A large number of us have developed a feeling that architects tend to design houses for the approval of fellow architects and critics, not for the tenants.
Speech at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, May 30 1984
On the extension to the National Gallery
Like a carbuncle on the face of an old and valued friend.
Quoted in the Times, May 31 1984
On the press
Is it not the case that in the legitimate pursuit of news, in the desire to make information available to the public, in the desire to hold public bodies and public figures to account, and in its desire to entertain, the media in all its forms sometimes becomes too cynical, too ready to assume the worst, to construct the general out of the particular, and too eager to focus on the short-term and forget the long-term?
Speech to mark the 300th anniversary of Fleet Street newspapers, March 11 2002
On God
During the last three centuries, the western world has seen the growth of a damaging division in the way we see and understand the world around us. Science has tried to assume a monopoly - or rather, a tyranny - over our understanding of the world around us. Religion and science have become separated, and science has attempted to separate the natural world from God, with the result that it has fragmented the cosmos and placed the sacred into a separate, and secondary, compartment of our understanding, divorced from the practical day-to-day world of man. We are only now beginning to understand the disastrous results of this outlook.
Speech entitled "Sacred in the Modern World", July 10 1996
On Islam
We in the west need to understand the Islamic world's view of us . . . The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims - and I do not just mean the extremists among them.
Speech entitled Islam and the West, October 27 1993
On Shakespeare, art and metaphysics
I am one of those who do not believe, as the scientific rationalists seem to, that human consciousness is the product merely of brain processes, or that the cosmos is a huge machine to be examined, experimented with and manipulated by man for his own all-knowing purposes. There is more to mankind, in my view, than a mere mechanical object functioning in a mechanistic world, which has evolved from the clockwork universe of Newton to the computer models now deemed to possess artificial intelligence. Despite all the dramatic changes that have been wrought by science and technology, and the remarkable benefits they have brought us, there remains deep in the soul of each of us a vital metaphysical ingredient which makes life worth living . . . Great literature offers one of the keys to understanding these truths and to understanding ourselves.
Annual Shakespeare birthday lecture, April 22 1991
On fast food
We no more want to live in anonymous concrete blocks that are just like anywhere else in the world than we want to eat anonymous junk food which can be bought anywhere.
Speech at the Terra Madre (Mother Earth) conference, Turin, October 23 2004
On local culture
In Britain we are rapidly losing what is left of our local culture. When we finally wake up and find it all gone, it will not be possible to reinvent it - or grow it in a test tube.
Message to Suffolk Agricultural Association for their conference in February 2004
On what we can learn from slums
I came across a classic example of "collective intelligence embodied in centuries of tradition" when I visited a shanty town slum in Bombay recently . . . I was fascinated by the way in which human beings - almost like ants coming together intuitively to create a nest - instinctively coalesce when brought together in large numbers into an "urban form" which enhances that vital sense of community. And it is communities we must create.
Ditto
On blue blood
What I want to know is; what is actually wrong with an elite, for God's sake?
Quoted in the Observer, 1985
Research by Jason Rodrigues and Alan Power.
