Chemists From England

"She does have a very natural understanding of what the people, the majority, the good hearted, the people who really care about the country, think... She doesn't actually have that superior feeling about ordinary people's views. She does have a real belief that they are worthwhile. She isn't in any way snooty, intellectually snooty, she has a simplicity which enables her to feel for people who say, "I don't want old ladies mugged on the street. If we hanged the muggers then they wouldn't be mugged on the street." She managed to disentangle herself from the rather artificial reactions of the House of Commons, of government, of metropolitan man. She can react as ordinary people do to a series of events, and that's tremendous strength."

"I found our conversation startling. She had a level of understanding of the way the world worked that most people in the political realm are unable to acquire. And it was a view that I would agree with. She believed in free-market discipline."

"Fortunately Hayek never had any influence on Thatcher's policies. (Her chief economic adviser in these years was Alan Walters, a Friedman-style monetarist.) Equally, and perhaps also happily, Thatcher had no understanding of Hayek's ideas. If it was true that she carried about with her for a time a copy of Hayek's magnum opus, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), she cannot have read its postscript, "Why I am not a Conservative", in which Hayek explains that he rejects conservatism because it lacks a vision of human progress. A case can be made that Thatcher was no conservative, either – at least if being conservative includes an aversion to policies that impose deep changes on inherited social institutions. But this is a view that goes only so far. Unlike Hayek, Thatcher understood and accepted the political limits of market economics."

"She spoke like Queen Elizabeth I. She looked like Queen Elizabeth I."

"The Iron Lady was a great lady. She deserves applause."

"Nor could it have been expected that the first woman to become prime minister of Great Britain would challenge the social welfare state in Western Europe. Margaret Thatcher's path to power, like Deng's, had not been easy. Born without wealth or status, disadvantaged by gender in a male-dominated political establishment, she rose to the top through hard work, undisguised ambition, and an utter unwillingness to mince words. Her principal targets were high taxes, nationalized industries, deference to labor unions, and intrusive government regulation. "No theory of government was ever given a fairer test . . . than democratic socialism received in Britain," she later argued. "Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect." The results she produced after eleven years in power were not as impressive as Deng's, but they did show that privatization, deregulation, and the encouragement of entrepreneurs—even, critics said, of greed—could command wide popular support. That too was a blow to Marxism, for if capitalism really did exploit "the masses," why did so many among them cheer the "iron lady"? Thatcher minced no words either about detente. "[W]e can argue about Soviet motives," she told an American audience soon after taking office, "but the fact is that the Russians have the weapons and are getting more of them. It is simple prudence for the West to respond." The invasion of Afghanistan did not surprise her: "I had long understood that detente had been ruthlessly used by the Soviets to exploit western weakness and disarray. I knew the beast." Not since Churchill had a British leader used language in this way: suddenly words, not euphemisms, were being used again to speak truths, not platitudes. From California a former movie actor turned politician turned broadcaster gave the new prime minister a rave review. "I couldn't be happier," Ronald Reagan told his radio audience. "I've been rooting for her . . . since our first meeting. If anyone can remind England of the greatness she knew . . . when alone and unafraid her people fought the Battle of Britain it will be the Prime Minister the Eng[lish] press has already nicknamed 'Maggie.'"

"The blood that is spilling is not my responsibility. It is the responsibility of Mrs. 'No.'"

"No other British Prime Minister would have won the Falklands War or the miners' strike. She showed unique resolution and clarity. She was terrifyingly inspiring. If she hadn't won, we'd be like Greece."

"She has towered over all her contemporaries... Her courage – intellectual, psychological and in the face of physical danger – is quite out of the ordinary. It is her unwavering purpose that has kept her government on their fixed course through the troughs as well as the crests of party and personal popularity. The temptation to take the easier path, to fudge, and to trim, are immense. She herself has never succumbed to it... Mrs Thatcher evokes admiration and detestation for one identical reason: she is 'big'. She has impressed herself on government as nobody has done since the war years of Churchill. She falls short of greatness, but she radiates dominance. I do not believe that in our lifetime we shall ever look upon her like again."

"On one occasion I asked her, "Mrs T, what was your greatest disappointment in government?" Again as though she had thought long and hard beforehand about it, she said, "I cut taxes and I thought we would get a giving society, and we haven't.""

"For us she is not the iron lady. She is the kind, dear Mrs. Thatcher."

"[When Mrs Thatcher was Education Secretary] I was struck then by her incisiveness in everything she said, and her grasp of her subject. She was never caught out, ever, by any question asked. So my recollection of her is quite clear. Curiously enough I came back one day and said to my wife, "You know, she's got the brains of all of us put together, and so we'd better look out.""

"What kind of leadership Mrs Thatcher will provide remains to be seen... But one thing is clear enough at this stage – Mrs Thatcher is a bonny fighter. She believes in the ethic of hard work and big rewards for success. She has risen from humble origins by effort and ability and courage. She owes nothing to inherited wealth or privilege. She ought not to suffer, therefore, from that fatal and characteristic 20th-century Tory defect of guilt about wealth. All too often this has meant that the Tories have felt themselves to be at a moral disadvantage in the defence of capitalism against socialism. This is one reason why Britain has travelled so far down the collectivist road. What Mrs Thatcher ought to be able to offer is the missing moral dimension to the Tory attack on socialism. If she does so, her succession to the leadership could mark a sea-change in the whole character of party political debate in this country."

"Powellism anticipated, Thatcherism coincided with, changes in economic opinion which occurred very generally among economists, civil servants and financial commentators of all political opinions in face of the economic decline of the 1970s. They were also parts of a struggle for power, victory in which enabled Mrs Thatcher to play radical variations on that patriotic conjunction of freedom, authority, inequality, individualism and average decency and respectability, which had been the Conservative Party's theme since at least 1886 and the aspiration it had maintained through all the resistances it had encountered from, and all the concessions it had made to, the higher thought, collectivist practice and the caution, or reluctance, of its leaders. The Conservative Party under Mrs Thatcher has used a radical rhetoric to give intellectual respectability to what the Conservative Party has always wanted."

"We shall remember – not the bomb or the ruined building – but your courage, calm and nobility in the aftermath."

"Given half the chance she would have led poor MacCormick and the camera crew in a chorus of "Rule Britannia" before the credits rolled. She is the most outrageous female performer since Edna Everage, she positively exults in getting whatever Buggins is unfortunate enough to have his turn in the ring and clouting him round the head, and kneeing him in the groin and all the time she smiles that damnable smile."

""There is no alternative" to the capitalist world economy, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed triumphantly as the socialist world crumbled in the 1980s. But she was wrong, and today's climate activists are turning her phrase on its head: we have no alternative but to change course, radically and rapidly."

"What does she want, this housewife? My balls on a tray?"

"[Margaret Thatcher] struck a chord which was waiting to be struck...all these fears of bureaucracy, of too much government, of the erosion of freedom of the individual, fears of anarchy...she just came at the time when all these fears began to coalesce."

"She is so clearly the best man among them...I can't help feeling a thrill, even though I believe her election will make things much more difficult for us. I have been saying for a long time that this country is ready...for a woman Prime Minister."

"Of all the elements combined in the complex of signs labelled Margaret Thatcher, it is her voice that sums up the ambiguity of the entire construct. She coos like a dove, hisses like a serpent, bays like a hound [in a contrived upper-class accent] reminiscent not of real toffs but of Wodehouse aunts."

"In 1979, blue collar Britain rescued this country when they backed Margaret Thatcher, rejecting the socialism of the elite. Despite endless expert economists objecting to the tough economic medicine Mrs Thatcher prescribed, it was blue collar Britain stuck with her as she turned our country around. She was elected four times in a row, never losing an election."

"It would be hard to overestimate the effect of this sort of snobbish condescension on the formation of Margaret Thatcher's character. The discovery that all the trendy people were against her only confirmed her certainty that they were all wrong and reinforced her righteous sense of persecution. She encountered the same patronising attitude when she first became Leader of the Opposition in 1975. She had probably met it already at school, where she was used to being a loner who was not allowed to go to dances: it was precisely the attitude Alfred had tried to arm her against by urging her to follow her own – or his – convictions and ignore the crowd. But nowhere can it have been more brutal than at Oxford, where she went up naively expecting to find rational inquiry but met only with arrogant superiority. This was her first encounter with the liberal establishment and she did not like it. It hardened her heart: one day she would get even. Janet Vaughan...gets no warm words in her memoirs. The experience forged her lifelong view of herself as an outsider, part of a persecuted minority, which never left her."

"[I]t was Alfred who instilled in her the habit of hard work, as something both virtuous in itself and the route to self-advancement. Throughout her life, it was her inexhaustible willingness to work longer hours than anyone else, her refusal to go to bed before she had read every last paper, which enabled her repeatedly to beat down colleagues and opponents by sheer mastery of detail. She once confessed to a recurring nightmare that "I'm going to take my final degree exam tomorrow and I haven't done a stroke of revision and I'm always terribly glad to wake up." As Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher still prepared for parliamentary questions or international summits like a schoolgirl swotting for an exam. She was contemptuous of opponents, colleagues or fellow heads of government who had stinted their homework. But however much they had done, she always expected to have done more."

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

"Of all the prime ministers that I have known, from Harold Macmillan to Lord Callaghan, she was the one who most wanted to do things, as distinct from simply being prime minister."

"Meetings with Mrs Thatcher are not for the faint-hearted or ill-briefed. She has normally read all the papers on the subjects under discussion, probably in the middle of the night when her ministers and advisers sleep. She will frequently launch a ferocious attack on a possible weak point in the arguments she is advised to accept. She expects her ministers and officials to defend them with with equal vigour if they believe they are right. She will interrupt them if they say something she disagrees with – and yet listen intently if they insist and prove to have an important point to make which she needs to consider. It sometimes seemed to me that she would on occasion tease her advisers by advancing some outrageous proposition in which she did not believe, just to see how they responded to it. Contrary to what is generally written in the newspapers and believed by her critics, she seemed to me positively to welcome serious argument and to have a high regard for those who argued with her most effectively."

"America's highest civilian award is the Medal of Freedom. And we're here to present it to one of the greatest leaders of our time... She's been called the Iron Lady—irrepressible, at times incorrigible, always indomitable... Her resolution and dedication set an example for all of us... Margaret Thatcher helped bring the cold war to an end, helped the human will outlast bayonets and barbed wire. She sailed freedom's ship wherever it was imperilled. Prophet and crusader, idealist and realist, this heroic woman made history move her way."

"I'll miss her because I value her counsel. I value her long experience and the wisdom that comes from that experience. She has been an outstanding Prime Minister for the United Kingdom and an outstanding friend to the United States."

"Her iron will won international respect. Her unabashed femininity gained women's. Margaret Thatcher was a lady's lady."

"She will be remembered not only for being Britain's first female prime minister and holding the office for eleven years, but also for the determination and resilience with which she carried out all her duties throughout her public life. Even those who disagreed with her never doubted the strength of her convictions and her unwavering belief in Britain's destiny in the world."

"I've not seen one interview in recent years where she hasn't wiped the floor with the interviewer with contemptuous ease."

"In Britain, Thatcher was comfortably re-elected in 1983 and 1987, and the radical left-wing challenge of a coal miners’ strike designed in effect to bring down the government was defeated in 1984–5. This strike had its own dynamic very much located in British industrial and labour politics, but can also be placed within the Cold War. The leadership of the British NUM (National Union of Mineworkers), was very left-wing and was ready to take money from both the Soviet Union and Libya. Faced by a national dock strike in support of the miners, the government, in July 1984, drew up plans for troops to move coal and food around the country. Thatcher’s closest aides saw the struggle as one to maintain effective government. In the end, the dock strike petered out in 1984. As another link with Cold War tensions, Thatcher survived an IRA bomb attack in 1984. The provision of arms to the IRA in part came from American sympathisers of Irish origin, but Eastern Bloc supplies were also significant, notably from Libya and Czechoslovakia. The IRA endorsed radical Marxist positions."

"She was a tigress surrounded by hamsters."

"The Prime Ministers who are remembered are those who think and teach, and not many do. Mrs. Thatcher... influenced the thinking of a generation."

"In terms of stamina and persistence, you have to admit Margaret Thatcher is an extraordinary woman. She came out of Number 10, saying "I fight on. I fight to win." Then she went to the House and made a statement on the Paris CSCE talks. You would think she would be downcast after that setback, but not at all. When Paddy Ashdown said that the Paris Treaty was one of the great moments of the twilight of her premiership, she replied, "As for twilight, people should remember that there is a 24-hour clock", which was a smashing answer."

"She behaves with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor."

"Reagan is a symptom of the American panic just as Maggie Thatcher is a symptom of the British panic. They want to thrust themselves, you and me, back into the past. Their identity is being attacked because they told themselves nothing but lies about us. I can now describe the people who described me. This involves a tremendous shift in the world. It is a dangerous time for us but a desperate time for them"."

"no one knows how we got here, from Maggie Thatcher in London to Ronald Reagan in America. If that is not the bottom of the barrel! And in terms of America, the Americans are even more abject than the Europeans who are stifling among their artefacts, their icons, which they call history."

"When she came to power in 1979 we genuinely debated whether or not those who governed Britain would be the trade unions or the elected Government of our country. I think her most significant achievement is that that question is no longer asked. She has had a unique character and unique strengths and abilities and unique faults as well."

"Remember how close the IRA came to killing her at Brighton in 1984. I have a sense that she feels she has been living on borrowed time and that she has so much left to do ever since. As you know, she needs very little sleep and sits up there in that study of hers on the first floor of No. 10 until the small hours. It's as if she looks out the window and sees the camp fires of her enemies who are surrounding her, just waiting for her to go. And she knows that so many of the old ways and policies she despises will begin to reappear the moment she does."

"The fall of Margaret Thatcher in the autumn of 1990 had much of the appearance of a return of British politics to its modern starting-point in the early sixties."

"Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."

"If my critics saw me walking over the River Thames they would say it was because I couldn't swim."

"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

"Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly."

"You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it."

"Victorian values."

"I owe nothing to Women's Lib."

"The problem is the Queen is the kind of woman who could vote SDP."