All Quotes

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

"The universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed. It should be no surprise to find this basic condition applying to your personal affairs."

"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."

"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."

"[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.""

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

"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.""

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[N]o British Prime Minister for whom I worked would have got a better deal than Margaret Thatcher and several would probably have settled for something inferior."

"Margaret Thatcher was the hardest-working head of Government I ever met. Her application was prodigious and she was always extraordinarily well briefed for every meeting. Whatever the subject, she could press her sometimes jarring and belligerent viewpoints with great authority, and for that I deeply respected her."

"It is Mrs Thatcher's great merit that she has broken with the Keynesian immorality of 'in the long run we are all dead' and to have concentrated on the long run future of the country irrespective of possible effects on the electors. Keynesian irresponsibility naturally appeals to the timid wets... Mrs Thatcher's courage makes her put the long run future of the country first. After being much too long restrained by the believers in the Muddle of the Middle, her new stature ought to enable her to guide us by her true vision."

"A mixture of a matron at a minor public school and a guard in a concentration camp."

"I have always admired you, because you are a true commitment politician, as I trust I am... Politically, I cannot be sorry that you are no longer PM. Yet in a personal sense I am terribly sorry as although I disagreed with you, no one could say you were not honest, courageous and with great integrity."

"She comes from a certain social background, one step up the ladder of economic success, with it, a lot of the characteristics that you associate with people who've just made it. A certain intolerance of those who haven't, a certain suspicion of those who are further up the ladder, a certain bigotry. Slightly over-simplistic solutions about the nature of the society in which they live. And then she went to university and got a fantastic degree and she had a fine mind."

"You've got to put her in the same category as Bloody Mary, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Anne and Queen Victoria. However, she reminds me most of Queen Elizabeth I out of these four. Her handling of men is not dissimilar. I mean, if you had been a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I you would never have known quite whether you were going to get the treatment of an admired friend, or a poke in the eye with an umbrella."

"She was motivated by a real sense of shame at what her country had become, and a manic sense of mission that never left her. She showed phenomenal energy and stamina, a readiness to fight rather than compromise, and, once engaged, an absolute refusal to haul up the white flag. Her achievements, judged simply in terms of what faced her in 1979, were truly astonishing. She knew what was happening to the country, but, unlike most of her contemporaries, she believed it could be saved. Ten years later she had been proved right about the country, the unions, the 1981 Budget, the Falklands, the miners, and right – in my view – about Europe and the single currency. She had transformed Britain's prospects where other politicians who had appeared cleverer, more experienced and more sophisticated had failed."

"Oh yes, she is dramatically exciting! She has an openness, a frankness, an enthusiasm and an unwillingness to be cowed and overcome by tiredness which makes her enormous fun to work with. You can never be quite sure on issues you have never discussed with her what her instinctive reaction will be, but it's bound to be interesting. She is as willing as any politician to be pre-occupied with the difficulties of the situation. Britain has not been winning for many years and the business of turning us round so that we begin to become winners again instead of losers is very difficult and there are many days when you go into the office and yet again the cards seem to fall in the wrong way. In politics as in any other walk of life, you just wonder when your lucky breaks are going to come back again. Now Margaret is quite undaunted by that. She is willing to be pre-occupied with the difficulties and discuss them because they have to be discussed, but you never feel that she is being overborne by them and she is able to show that even on the days when it isn't fun, she thinks it's well worth while having a try!"

"Margaret Thatcher was beyond argument a great Prime Minister. Her tragedy is that she may be remembered less for the brilliance of her many achievements than for the recklessness with which she later sought to impose her own increasingly uncompromising views."

"Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high-achievers, other than rock singers and courtesans, I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious. They can't bear to think of her as one of the most successful women of the 20th century."

"Thatcherism was still wreaking, and had wrought for the previous decade, the most heinous social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country... We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice—and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees, all these were the way forward."

"History will surely recognise her achievements as Britain's first woman Prime Minister, a leader with the courage of her convictions who assailed the conventional wisdom of her day, challenged and overthrew the existing order, changed the political map, and put the country on its feet again. She did all this with ruthlessness and much injustice and at a high cost in human misery, but she did it."

"She seems to me to have been gripped since before she won the leadership of the Tory party by a clear understanding, a passionately clear understanding, of the interacting causes of our relative economic decline. She saw it, as it seems to me, partly stemming from successive governments which by increasing the money supply kept on rescuing managements and labour from having to become more competitive. She saw it therefore as primarily a failure of government in creating the climate which enabled inefficiencies to continue to the point where all our neighbours soared past us in competitiveness, in prosperity, in social services, in standard of living and in purchasing power for all their people. She saw it infecting management which was allowed to be flabby. And she saw it as intensified or made worse and more difficult by the uncomprehending approach of trade unions who don't seem to realise where their members' interests lie."

"I took care not to arrange a single meeting between Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative councillors on Barnet Council. For allowing her to sit round the same table would have ended with blood on the floor, and it would not have been hers. That they are Conservative councillors matters little to her. She cannot see a councillor, let alone a bunch of them, without the conviction rising rapidly in her that they could be running their council under a much stricter financial regime."

"While I would not go so far as to say that Mrs. Thatcher had a coherent ideological agenda, she most certainly harbored dogmatic prejudices to which radical policies could be appended according to convenience and opportunity. Although anything but an intellectual herself, Margaret Thatcher was unusually attracted to intellectual men who could assist her in justifying and describing her own instincts—so long as they were themselves outsiders and not tarred with the brush of convention. Unlike the more moderate conservatives whose policies and ambitions she so devastatingly thwarted, Mrs. Thatcher was quite unprejudiced against Jews, showing something of a predilection for them in her choice of private advisors. Finally, and once again in contrast to her conservative predecessors, she was rather sympathetic to the writings of economists—but only and egregiously those from one particular school: Hayek and the Austrians."

"[The British armed forces responded to Mrs. Thatcher as war leader] in a way that hasn't been known since the time of Elizabeth I, with a passion and loyalty that few male generals have ever inspired or commanded."

"If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old."

"I found her totally different from other politicians. Every other politician I knew said that in order to win elections you had to win the centre. Her position was that you had to articulate your position as clearly as you can and the centre will come over to you... I was always very taken with her. You could say she seduced me... But I thought she might never get elected with those views."

""Economics are the method," Margaret Thatcher said, "the object is to change the heart and soul." It was a mission largely accomplished."

"Margaret Thatcher always gave me headaches."

"Her great virtue is saying that two and two makes four, which is unpopular nowadays as it always has been. I adore Mrs Thatcher. At last politics make sense to me, which it hasn't since Stafford Cripps."

"What a superb creature she is – right and beautiful – few prime ministers are either. But the country will let her down, too idle and selfish."

"Margaret was unusual, for a Tory leader, in actually warming to the Conservative Party – that is to say, the party in the country, rather than its Members of Parliament... Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the party, Alec Home tolerated it, Ted Heath loathed it. Margaret genuinely liked it. She felt a communion with it, one which later expanded to embrace the silent majority of the British people as a whole."

"Of all the prime ministers, I thought she offered the best hope for Britain. Her strengths were her passionate belief in her country and her iron will to turn it around. She was convinced that free enterprise and the free market led to a free society. Her basic political instincts were sound though she tended to be too self-confident and self-righteous. Her disadvantage, in a class-conscious Britain, was her background as "the grocer's daughter". It was a pity that the British establishment still labored under these prejudices. By the time she left office, Britons had become less class-ridden."

"The greatest Prime Minister this century toppled for no good reason, by pygmies."

"From the military man's point of view she was an ideal Prime Minister... One wanted a decision and she gave it."

"If you fight a war, you want a great general. She was a great general."

"She is an enemy of apartheid... We have much to thank her for."

"I think Margaret Thatcher started it, the greed thing, people just wanting more and more."

"Personally I think that she has the qualities of a very great politician. I believe she has tremendous conviction, she has drive, she has commitment, she is totally genuine. On the other side I think she has a certain tunnel vision, she is uncompromising, she goes over the top too much – she did over the miners, she tried to make out that Arthur Scargill was Galtieri and that the miners were the Argies. I think that view does not go down well in the country. And I think she's deeply lacking in compassion and sensitivity."

"She has the eyes of Stalin and the voice of Marilyn Monroe."

"Margaret Thatcher is the greatest living Englishwoman."

"She's the biggest bastard we have ever known."