Margaret Thatcher Quotes

262 Sourced Quotes

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
Everything a politician promises at election time has to be paid for either by higher taxation or by borrowing.

Margaret Thatcher
When will Labour learn that you cannot build Jerusalem in Brussels.

Margaret Thatcher
Just rejoice at the news and congratulate our armed forces and the Marines. Rejoice!

Margaret Thatcher
If we open our hearts to God, He has promised to work within us.

Margaret Thatcher
The messages on our banners in 1979 - freedom, opportunity, family, enterprise, ownership - are now inscribed on the banners in Leipzig, Warsaw, Budapest and even Moscow.

Margaret Thatcher
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.

Margaret Thatcher
Their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles.

Margaret Thatcher
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
I'm standing up for the right of self-determination. I'm standing up for our territory. I'm standing up for our people. I'm standing up for international law. I'm standing up for all those territories - those small territories and peoples the world over - who, if someone doesn't stand up and say to an invader 'enough, stop', would be at risk.

Margaret Thatcher
I am not one who, to quote an American author, believes that democracy and enterprise have finally won the battle of ideas - that we have therefore arrived at the end of history, and there is nothing left to fight for. That would be unutterably complacent, indeed foolish. There will always be threats to freedom, not only from frontal assaults, but more insidiously by erosion from within.

Margaret Thatcher
Gentlemen, I have spent the night thinking about this Peruvian (peace) initiative and I have to tell you that if it is your decision to accept then you will have to find another Prime Minister.

Margaret Thatcher
I owe a great deal to the church for everything in which I believe. I am very glad that I was brought up strictly. I was a very serious child. There was not a lot of fun and sparkle in my life.

Margaret Thatcher
I am an undiluted admirer of American values and the American dream and I believe they will continue to inspire not just the people of the United States but millions across the face of the globe.

Margaret Thatcher
I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.

Margaret Thatcher
In those days one advantage of being a woman was that there was a basic courtesy towards us on which we could draw - something which today's feminists have largely dissipated.

Margaret Thatcher
A democratic Europe of nation states could be a force for liberty, enterprise and open trade. But, if creating a United States of Europe overrides these goals, the new Europe will be one of subsidy and protection

Margaret Thatcher
My first guiding principle is this: willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.

Margaret Thatcher
I believe we should continue to have a partnership of national states each retaining the right to protect its vital interests, but developing more effectively than at present the habit of working together.

Margaret Thatcher
I exercise my right as a free citizen to spend my own money in my own way, so that I can go on the day, the time, to the doctor I choose and get out fast.

Margaret Thatcher
What really gets me is this - it's very ironic that those who are most critical of extra tax are those who are most vociferous in demanding extra expenditure. What gets me even more is that having demanded that extra expenditure they are not prepared to face the consequences of their own action and stand by the necessity to get the tax to pay for it. I wish some of them had a bit more guts and courage than they have.

Margaret Thatcher
Our judgement is that the presence of the Royal Marines garrison is sufficient deterrent against any possible aggression.

Margaret Thatcher
We introduced the Community Charge. I still call it that. I like the Poles - I never had any intention of taxing them.

Margaret Thatcher
I went to Oxford University - but I've never let that hold me back.

Margaret Thatcher
What happened in Russia in 1917 wasn't a revolution - it was a coup d'etat.

Margaret Thatcher
When you stop a dictator, there are always risks. But there are greater risks in not stopping a dictator.

Margaret Thatcher
The Government wants a peaceful settlement. But we totally reject a peaceful sell-out.

Margaret Thatcher
We weren't getting a fair deal on the budget and I wasn't going to have it. There's a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people - this is our characteristic. There's not a strand of equity and fairness in Europe - they're out to get as much as they can. That's one of those enormous differences. So I tackled it on that basis.

Margaret Thatcher
No Western nation has to build a wall round itself to keep its people in.

Margaret Thatcher
There are dangers in consensus: it could be an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything.... No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do.

Margaret Thatcher