Top 100 Quotes About Thatcher
#1. When I'm out of politics I'm going to run a business, it'll be called rent-a-spine
Margaret Thatcher
#2. During my lifetime most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it.
Margaret Thatcher
#3. Remember how Margaret Thatcher came to believe that abroad was more important than at home? Didn't do her much good.
Simon Hoggart
#6. I think my parents knew before I did that I was going to be an actress, because I was doing impressions of Margaret Thatcher at the age of four.
Michelle Dockery
#8. Good Conservatives always pay their bills. And on time. Not like the Socialists who run up other people's bills.
Margaret Thatcher
#9. I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.
Margaret Thatcher
#10. It is no exaggeration to describe plain English as a fundamental tool of government.
Margaret Thatcher
#11. Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.
Margaret Thatcher
#12. We should see to it that our people are steeped in a real knowledge and understanding of our national culture.
Margaret Thatcher
#13. If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
Margaret Thatcher
#14. Is there conscience in the Kremlin? Do they ever ask themselves what is the purpose of life? What is it all for? ... No. Their creed is barren of conscience, immune to the promptings of good and evil.
Margaret Thatcher
#15. I love argument, I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that's not their job.
Margaret Thatcher
#16. Two famous happy warriors - Reagan and his political soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history.
Monica Crowley
#17. Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.
Margaret Thatcher
#18. It took us a long time to get rid of the effects of the French Revolution 200 years ago. We don't want another one.
Margaret Thatcher
#19. John Redwood is a young man but, let's face it, so was Margaret Thatcher in 1975.
Edward Leigh
#20. If Margaret Thatcher took climate change seriously and believed that we should take action to reduce global greenhouse emissions, then taking action and supporting and accepting the science can hardly be the mark of incipient Bolshevism.
Malcolm Turnbull
#21. It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken.
Margaret Thatcher
#22. To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.
Margaret Thatcher
#23. The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution - even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher's strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary.
Nigel Hamilton
#24. We need to create a mood where it is everywhere thought morally right for as many people as possible to acquire capital.
Margaret Thatcher
#26. I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state.
Thom Yorke
#27. There are some remarkable parallels between basketball and politics. Michael Jordan has already mastered the skill most needed for political success: how to stay aloft without visible means of support.
Margaret Thatcher
#29. I do wish I had brought my cheque book. I don't believe in credit cards.
Margaret Thatcher
#30. I'm quoting Margaret Thatcher. I quote her frequently.
Carly Fiorina
#31. Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.
Margaret Thatcher
#32. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.
Rush Limbaugh
#33. Reality hasn't really intervened in my mother's life since the seventies.
Carol Thatcher
#35. No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well.
Margaret Thatcher
#37. If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it.
Margaret Thatcher
#38. For forty years I have been married to one of the greatest women the world has ever produced. All I could produce - small as it may be - was love and loyalty.
Denis Thatcher
#39. The nanny seemed to be extinct until 1975, when, like the coelacanth, she suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.
Simon Hoggart
#40. John Gummer just did not have the political clout or credibility to rally the troops. I had appointed him as a sort of nightwatchman, but he seemed to have to sleep on the job.
Margaret Thatcher
#41. A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure,
Margaret Thatcher
#42. In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world.
Margaret Thatcher
#43. Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from her own side of the House.
Simon Hoggart
#44. Everything a politician promises at election time has to be paid for either by higher taxation or by borrowing.
Margaret Thatcher
#46. Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends.
Margaret Thatcher
#48. It is important not to allow ever wider coalition-building to become an end in itself. As we saw in the Gulf War of 1990, international pressures, particularly those exerted from within an alliance, can result in the failure to follow actions through and so leave future problems unresolved.
Margaret Thatcher
#49. Thatcher set ordinary people free, but into a landscape that her other policies had already shaped to suit other, more powerful interests, such as large corporations or Britons with inherited wealth.
Andy Beckett
#50. We should not expect the state to appear in the guise of an extravagant good fairy at every christening, a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey, and the unknown mourner at every funeral.
Margaret Thatcher
#51. About Thatcher's death: Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out on competetive tender and accept the cheapest bid. That's what she would have wanted.
Ken Loach
#52. This business of the working class is on its way out I think. After all, aren't I working class? I work jolly hard, I can tell you.
Margaret Thatcher
#53. If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.
Margaret Thatcher
#54. When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn't in Scotland's interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.
Jimmy Reid
#56. Let us, then, draw together in the name, not of jingoism, but of justice
Margaret Thatcher
#57. Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher's children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.
Tony Judt
#58. You can present people with ideas they may come to believe in, and as a result of them they will act, if they have the opportunities. Presenting people with opportunities is part of what politics is about.
Margaret Thatcher
#59. When England was a kingdom, we had a king. When we were an empire, we had an emperor. Now we're a country, and we have Margaret Thatcher.
Kenny Everett
#61. We should not underestimate the enormity of the task which lies ahead. But little can be achieved without sound money. It is the bedrock of sound government.
Margaret Thatcher
#62. If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification.
Margaret Thatcher
#63. Bribing regimes to comply with requirements which they should have acknowledged in the first place is not a process that appeals to me.
Margaret Thatcher
#64. I love his music because he was my generation. But then again, Elvis is everyone's generation, and he always will be.
Margaret Thatcher
#66. Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.
Margaret Thatcher
#67. We must not fall into the trap of projecting our own morality onto the Soviet leaders. They do not share our aspirations, they are not constrained by our ethics, they always consider themselves exempt from the rules that bind other states.
Margaret Thatcher
#68. In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
Margaret Thatcher
#69. I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society
from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.
Margaret Thatcher
#70. The patronage state is an arrogant state. It assumes it can spend your money better than you do. Yet it expects you to work for it in the first place.
Margaret Thatcher
#71. Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world's population and defending it for most of the rest.
Margaret Thatcher
#72. I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs. Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours.
Sue Townsend
#73. To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
#74. Marxists get up early to further their cause. We must get up even earlier to defend our freedom.
Margaret Thatcher
#75. Paddy Ashdown is the only party leader who's a trained killer. Although, to be fair, Mrs Thatcher was self taught.
Charles Kennedy
#76. In the same period that the Americans have lived under one constitution our French friends notched up five. A Punch cartoon has a 19th century Englishman asking a librarian for a copy of the French constitution, only to be told: 'I am sorry Sir, we do not stock periodicals.'
Margaret Thatcher
#77. Thatcher was prepared to destroy the world rather than give in on something she believed in.
Ken Livingstone
#78. Part of my dogsbody job during the 1983 election was choosing Mum's missile-proof clothes. They had to be disposable.
Carol Thatcher
#79. I am an ally of the United States. We believe the same things, we believe passionately in the same battle of ideas, we will defend them to the hilt. Never try to separate me from them.
Margaret Thatcher
#80. Michelle will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations ... I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher ... We've got it all.
Barack Obama
#81. I am not as cross about Thatcher now as I was in the '80s. Begrudgingly, I can see that some of her policies helped modernise Britain.
Martin Parr
#82. My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.
John Lydon
#84. Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.
Margaret Thatcher
#85. Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.
Margaret Thatcher
#86. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
Margaret Thatcher
#87. I wasn't absolutely too sure where the Falklands was, and I didn't want to make a bloody fool of myself.
Denis Thatcher
#88. Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them.
Margaret Thatcher
#90. The legal system we have and the rule of law are far more responsible for our traditional liberties than any system of one man one vote. Any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law.
Margaret Thatcher
#91. Thatcher forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of home ownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial opportunities.
David Harvey
#92. What happened in Russia in 1917 wasn't a revolution - it was a coup d'etat.
Margaret Thatcher
#93. All the general propositions favouring freedom I had .. imbibed at my father's knee or acquired by candle-end reading of Burke and Hayek ...
Margaret Thatcher
#95. This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.
Charles Stross
#96. It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.
Margaret Thatcher
#97. It would have been a very, very good thing if the next election after Margaret went we had lost.
Denis Thatcher
#98. The Eurythmics were back on the charts. Dirty Dancing was at the box office. The Iron curtain was still standing. Margaret Thatcher had been re-elected for a third term. There we were, back in 1987.
Nicola Lagioia
#99. The desire to win is born in most of us. The will to win is a matter of training. The manner of winning is a matter of honour.
Margaret Thatcher
