Top 50 Prince Harry Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This is not just about women. We men need to recognize the part we play, too. Real men treat women with the dignity and respect they deserve.”

— Prince Harry

2. “You’ve got to give something back. You can’t just sit there.”

— Prince Harry

3. “I’m very sorry if I offended anybody. I’d like to put it in the past now. What’s done is done. I regret it.”

— Prince Harry

4. “It’s very nice to be a sort of normal person for once; I think it’s about as normal as I’m going to get.”

— Prince Harry

5. “Anyone who says they don’t enjoy the Army is mad – you can spend a week hating it and the next week it could be the best thing in the world and the best job you could ever, ever wish for. It has got so much to offer.”

— Prince Harry

6. “To be honest dinner conversations was the worst bit about being a child and listening to the boring people around me.”

— Prince Harry

7. “I’ve served my country.”

— Prince Harry

8. “I’ve longed for kids since I was very, very young. And so I’m waiting to find the right person, someone who’s willing to take on the job.”

— Prince Harry

9. “Conversations with my mother, father, my grandparents, as I’ve grown up have obviously driven me towards wanting to try and make a difference as much as possible.”

— Prince Harry

10. “I get a huge buzz from spending time with kids.”

— Prince Harry

11. “For me personally, as I said, I want to serve my country. I’ve done it once, and I’m still in the army, I feel as though I should get the opportunity to do it again.”

— Prince Harry

12. “The Heir and the Spare – there was no judgment about it, but also no ambiguity. I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.”

— Prince Harry

13. “I am very sorry if I have caused any offence. It was a poor choice of costume.”

— Prince Harry

14. “Weddings were joyous occasions, sure, but they were also low-key funerals, because after saying their vows people tended to disappear.”

— Prince Harry

15. “With bagpipes it’s not the tune, it’s the tone.”

— Prince Harry

16. “Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last?”

— Prince Harry

17. “Enough death – enough. When is someone in this family going to break free and live?”

— Prince Harry

18. “What hell, being an adult!”

— Prince Harry

19. “Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

— Prince Harry

20. “He was, I realize now, one of the most truthful people I’ve ever known, and he knew a secret about truth that many people are unwilling to accept: it’s usually painful.”

— Prince Harry

21. “Adults called it the nursery. Willy had the larger half, with a double bed, a good-sized basin, a cupboard with mirrored doors, a beautiful window looking down on the courtyard, the fountain, the bronze statue of a roe deer buck. My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.”

— Prince Harry

22. “Yanks didn’t beat about the bush, didn’t fill the air with polite snorts and throat clearings before coming to the point. Whatever was on their mind, they’d spit it out, like a sneeze, and while that could be problematic at times, I usually found it preferable to the alternative: No one saying what they truly felt. No one wanting to hear how you felt.”

— Prince Harry

23. “She said: That was everything. She said: That is a man. My love. She said: That is not a Spare.”

— Prince Harry

24. “He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature. I was showing my true nature, he said, by seeking to atone. Seeking absolution.”

— Prince Harry

25. “And among the whole family. For months the Windsors had been at war. There had been strife in our ranks, off and on, going back centuries, but this was different. This was a full-scale public rupture, and it threatened to become irreparable. So, though I’d flown home specifically and solely for Grandpa’s funeral, while there I’d asked for.”

— Prince Harry

26. “As a confirmed bachelor I was an outsider, a nonperson within my own family. If I wanted that to change, I had to get hitched. That simple. All of which made my twenty-ninth birthday a complex milestone, and some days a complex migraine.”

— Prince Harry

27. “Maybe she was omnipresent for the very same reason that she was indescribable – because she was light, pure and radiant light, and how can you really describe light? Even Einstein struggled with that one.”

— Prince Harry

28. “Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.”

— Prince Harry

29. “I’d traveled the world from top to bottom, literally. I’d hopscotched the continents. I’d met hundreds of thousands of people, I’d crossed paths with a ludicrously large cross-section of the planet’s seven billion residents. For thirty-two years I’d watched a conveyor-belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice. This woman stopped the conveyer belt.”

— Prince Harry

30. “How beautiful it all is, I thought. And also how sad.”

— Prince Harry

31. “Icompleted my education at Eton in June 2003, thanks to hours of hard work and some extra tutoring arranged by Pa. No small feat for one so unscholarly, so limited, so distracted, and while I wasn’t proud of myself, exactly, because I didn’t know how to be proud of myself, I felt a distinct pause in my nonstop internal self-criticism.”

— Prince Harry

32. “All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehaviour and centuries of inbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to press gaslighting.”

— Prince Harry

33. “Study, concentration, requires an alliance with the mind, and in my teen years I was waging all-out war with mine.”

— Prince Harry

34. “My family had declared me a nullity. The Spare. I didn’t complain about it, but I didn’t need to dwell on it either. Far better, in my mind, not to think about certain facts, such as the cardinal rule for royal travel: Pa and William could never be on the same flight together, because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out. But no one gave a damn whom I traveled with; the Spare could always be spared.”

— Prince Harry

35. “He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people – forgiveness. He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature.”

— Prince Harry

36. “It wasn’t that she felt no emotions. On the contrary, I always thought that Granny experienced all the normal human emotions. She just knew better than the rest of us mortals how to control them.”

— Prince Harry

37. “Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can’t be changed.”

— Prince Harry

38. “He didn’t seem sad, just ready. You have to know when it’s time to go, Harry.”

— Prince Harry

39. “In this mixed-up world, this pain-filled life, we’d done it. we’d managed to find each other.”

— Prince Harry

40. “Also, the notorious Wallis Simpson. Also, her doubly notorious husband Edward, the former King and my great-great-uncle. After Edward gave up his throne for Wallis, after they fled Britain, both of them fretted about their ultimate return – both obsessed about being buried right here. The Queen, my grandmother, granted their plea. But she placed them at a distance from everyone else, beneath a stooped plane tree. One last finger wag, perhaps.”

— Prince Harry

41. “Among all the different, riotous emotions coursing through my brother that afternoon, one really jumped out at me. He seemed aggrieved. He seemed put upon that I wasn’t meekly obeying him, that I was being so impertinent as to deny him, or defy him, to refute his knowledge, which came from his trusted aides. There was a script here and I had the audacity not to be following it. He was in full Heir mode, and couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t dutifully playing the role of the Spare.”

— Prince Harry

42. “I recall one headline, addressed pointedly at Granny: Show Us You Care. How rich, coming from the same fiends who “cared” so much about Mummy that they chased her into a tunnel from which she never emerged.”

— Prince Harry

43. “I’ve never been more in love with you than in that moment.”

— Prince Harry

44. “In a lifetime of existential crises, this was a bugger. Who are you when you can no longer be the thing you’ve always been, the thing you’ve trained to be?”

— Prince Harry

45. “And whenever I complained about it, privately or publicly, people just rolled their eyes. They said I was whingeing, said I only pretended to want privacy, said Meg was pretending as well. Oh, she’s getting chased, is she? Wah-wah, give us a break! She’ll be fine, she’s an actress, she’s used to paps, in fact, wants them. But no one wanted this. No one could ever get used to it. All those eye-rollers couldn’t take ten minutes of it.”

— Prince Harry

46. “We’d not broken up. She’d given me a touching, tender farewell, and promised to wait for me.”

— Prince Harry

47. “You’ve got to give something back.”

— Prince Harry

48. “I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace.”

— Prince Harry

49. “For the rest of my life, I knew, I’d be hearing some vestige of that sound; it would echo forever in some part of my being. I would also never forget, when the guns finally stopped, that immense silence.”

— Prince Harry

50. “Willy. Africa was his thing, he said.”

— Prince Harry