Quotes about Margaret Thatcher

53 Sourced Quotes

What's your name?" "Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer." "That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?" "Yes

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.

The state owned monopolies are among the greatest millstones round the neck of the economy... Liberals must stress at all times the virtues of the market, not only for efficiency but to enable the widest possible choice... Much of what Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph say and do is in the mainstream of liberal philosophy.

He was born into, and seems never to have questioned, that English "class system" which has been so much abused in the present century. Indeed, several governments have announced their intention of abolishing it, and the most recent prime minister to retire showed her egalitarian principles by accepting the title of Baroness Thatcher.

Robertson Davies

Heckler: At least Mrs Thatcher has got guts.
Neil Kinnock: It's a pity that other people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it.

On the Falklands War

Of the popularity of Mrs thatcher:

The further you got from Britain, the more admired you found she was.

James Callaghan

Mrs Thatcher has added the diplomacy of Alf Garnett to the economics of Arthur Daley.

Question: If Mrs Thatcher were run over by a bus…?
Lord Carrington: It wouldn't dare.

During the Falklands War

Lord Carrington

Nobody who has lived through the rise of the violent anti-Semitism which led to Hitler can refuse Mrs. Thatcher admiration for her courageous and outspoken warning. When I grew up in Vienna the established Jewish families were a generally respected group and all decent people would frown upon the occasional anti-Jewish outbursts of a few popular politicians. It was the sudden influx of large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews [during World War I] … which in a short period changed the attitude. They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed.

Friedrich Hayek

Of Lady thatcher:

A big cat detained briefly in a poodle parlour, sharpening her claws on the velvet.

There is a story that when Mrs Thatcher first met Gorbachev he gave her a ball-point and she offered him Labour-voting Scotland.

Nicholas Shakespeare

Garton Ash immersed himself much more deeply and single-mindedly than Ascherson in the politics of Eastern Europe during the final years of the Cold War. The period may have something to do with the difference. As the Eighties unfolded, the East European oppositions to Communism were steadily drawn into the magnetic field of the West's dominant ideology – the uncompromising doctrines of the Right proclaimed by Reagan and Thatcher. For Garton Ash, then an editor and contributor at the Spectator, this was a natural and desirable evolution. For Ascherson, no friend of Thatcherism, it must have posed more difficulties.

Of Margaret Thatcher:

I cannot bring myself to vote for a woman who has been voice-trained to speak to me as though my dog has just died.

Keith Waterhouse

A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of unlimited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise. If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot.

Friedrich Hayek

Mrs Thatcher tells us she has given the French president a piece of her mind…not a gift I would receive with alacrity.

There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change and it is for Mrs. Thatcher.

James Callaghan

She has peaked. I have the feeling of 1945. Mrs Thatcher has never known losing office as Gladstone did and the need to face changing circumstances and clear new obstacles before returning to power.

It obliges one to think with a particular kind of logic and severity. If it is nonsense, it will not go into Latin... I regard it as cruelty to the young to deprive them of that insight into language... Who would have thought Thatcher would be responsible for introducing the Prussian system, of dictating from central government the content of education in the supposed interest of the state? Translation into Latin was the great stamp and mark of English classical scholarship... My fatal decision was not to be pedantic and leave it in Latin. I had written Et Tiberim multo spumantem sanguine cerno: from Virgil in the Aeneid. And at the last minute I said, 'I can't put that out in Latin, that's pedantic'... In Latin, it would have been lost.

I am quite conservative about my appearance. At college, when all my friends were getting piercings or daft haircuts, I lacked the required self-confidence, so decided such vanities were a distraction from the main business of opposing Thatcher.

John O'Farrell (author)

Can you suggest any suitable aspersions to spread abroad about Mrs. Thatcher? It is idle to suggest she has unnatural relations with Mrs. Barbara Castle; what is needed is something socially lower: that she eats asparagus with knife and fork, or serves instant mash potatoes.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Whatever the lady [Thatcher] does is wrong. I do not know of a single right decision taken by her.

When Thatcher ran for prime minister she said — remember this, this is the Iron Lady — she said, "The British national health care system is safe in my hands." She wasn't going to take on health care, because she knew once you have people getting free health care from the government, you can't take it away from them. And the reason is because most people don't get sick, and so free health care is just that, free health care, until you get sick. Then, if you get sick and you don't get health care, you die and you don't vote. It's actually a pretty clever system. Take care of the people who can vote and people who can't vote, get rid of them as quickly as possible by not giving them care so they can't vote against you. That's how it works.

Obama is neither a socialist, nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet be an excellent president. But what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev, assisted in the end of an ideology, which once offered hope, and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision, which will lead to progress, but this time, we hope, without tyranny.

My own opinion on Mrs Thatcher is very simple: I think she's unsuited to our historical period, and I say this referring to her as a prime minister, and not as a woman.

Leopoldo Galtieri

I think Churchill would be appalled at the Thatcher government.