Margaret Thatcher Quotes

“If someone is confronting our essential liberties, if someone is inflicting injuries and harm, by God I'll confront them!”

“We simply cannot delegate the exercise of mercy and generosity to others.”

“Yet the basic fact remains: every regulation represents a restriction of liberty, every regulation has a cost. That is why, like marriage (in the Prayer Book's words), regulation should not "be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly"”

“In my work, you get used to criticisms. Of course you do, because there are a lot of people trying to get you down, but I always cheer up immensely if one is particularly wounding because I think well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left. That is why my father always taught me: never worry about anyone who attacks you personally; it means their arguments carry no weight and they know it.”

“Marxists get up early to further their cause. We must get up even earlier to defend our freedom.”

“When will Labour learn that you cannot build Jerusalem in Brussels.”

“I have a habit of comparing the phraseology of communiques . . . noting a certain similarity of words, a certain similarity of optimism . . . and a certain similarity in the lack of practical results during the ensuring years.”

“The West as a whole in the early 1990s become obsessed with a 'peace dividend' that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and sometimes soft-headed causes. Politicians forget that the only real peace dividend is peace.”

“My belief in free competitive economic enterprise does not rest solely or even mainly on arguments of economic efficiency, though, heaven knows, these are cogent enough. It rests essentially on the view that the free market is the only safe way of ensuring that productive effort is directed towards supplying what individuals actually want, and in a way which secures the dignity and independence of the worker.”

“Socialism is in no way a curate's egg”

“It is in a country's interests to keep faith with its allies. States in this sense are like people. If you have a reputation for exacting favors and not returning them, the favours dry up.”

“Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.”

“Consensus is the negation of leadership.”

“A bully has no respect for a weakling and the way to stop a bully is not to be weak. The way to stop a bully from ever being a bully is to say: "I'm as strong as you. Anything you do to me, I can do to you." We are going for nuclear and conventional disarmament but we're going about it in the right way.”

“Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them.”

“How very popular to say, 'spend more on this, expend more on that.' And of course, we all have our favorite causes; I know I do. But someone has to add up the figures. Every business has to do it, every housewife has to do it, [and] every government should do it.”

“I might have preferred iron - but bronze will do. It won't rust. This time I hope, the head will stay on.”

“When hecklers stand up, I get a mental jump for joy. It gives me something to get my teeth into - and the audiences love it.”

“Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.”

“Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.”

“Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.”

“Citizenship should be based on those who have a close and real relationship with this country and its inhabitants.”

“Let me give you my vision: A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country, and on that freedom all of our other freedoms depend.”

“Home is where you come to when you've got nothing better to do.”

“What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.”