All Quotes

"She's the Prime Minister who really wanted to be Queen. Major's boring, the Prime Minister who wanted to be a train spotter."

"[Television interviewers] simply lack the guts or resourcefulness to stand up to a politician who combines the hauteur of Trollope's Mrs Proudie with the jugular instincts of a fishwife."

"The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend. As a grocer's daughter who rose to become Britain's first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can't be shattered. As prime minister, she helped restore the confidence and pride that has always been the hallmark of Britain at its best. And as an unapologetic supporter of our transatlantic alliance, she knew that with strength and resolve we could win the Cold War and extend freedom's promise."

"Experience is the only source of wisdom: by which I mean, the competent conduct of life."

"Whenever I am asked which famous person dead or alive I would want to meet if I could, my answer is always without fail Margaret Thatcher. It surprises people that the leader of Britain's Conservative Party is my greatest shero. While her politics aren't mine, she was also a first-the first female prime minister of Britain. Thatcher was a self-starter in the grandest of ways. Without any kind of special invitation or connections, time and time again she showed up in rooms filled with men and didn't have to do much to lead them to decide that she should be in charge. That she held office for eleven years, longer than any other British politician in the twentieth century, proves her level of confidence and intellect. It was her fearlessness and internal sense of equality, however, which made her able to pull off being a first."

"Europe was less distracted and divided by disinformation campaigns from fossil fuel companies and emerged early on as a global leader on the climate issue. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a former research chemist, respected the scientific warnings and, also driven by her determination to break the power of the coal-mining unions, lent her support in 1989 to the concept of negotiating the UN Framework Convention...Thus, when the US stepped back from leadership on the climate issue, the European Union, led by the UK and Germany as well as the Netherlands and its Scandinavian member states, partly filled the void and pushed for global action to address the problem. Benefitting from German reunification and the collapse of the former East Germany's emissions, and those from other former Soviet states, the EU achieved the target it agreed to at Kyoto."

"[D]uring the [Falklands] war her leadership had been superb... Mrs Thatcher started off as terribly vulnerable. At home her political position was weak. A bad reverse in the early days and her leadership might have had to be terminated. An actual naval defeat down in the Southern Atlantic would have toppled her and possibly even the whole government. She knew she was playing for enormous stakes. But once she faced them, she behaved outstandingly well. Some potential Prime Ministers might have accepted the invasion, decided not to throw the Argentines out, and worked out some compromise. I have never doubted that such a course would have been absolutely devastating for this country. Mrs Thatcher recognised that from the start, instinctively, and deserves credit for it."

"When the historians seek parallels for the counter-revolution which took place in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, I think they will compare what happened here with what happened to France under General de Gaulle from 1958–68. Both leaders challenged their countries to do better, to think bigger and to reverse their relative decline. Both leaders drew heavily on a strident nationalism to galvanize their nations. Through their own hubris, both were ignominiously brought down by the people on whom they had relied in order to exert immense and unprecedented power... Both leaders sought regeneration from within, building up national pride and eschewing dilution through a United States of Europe."

"Someone once said that Margaret Thatcher satisfied the average Englishman's longing for the perfect dominatrix. No doubt about it, she could deliver pain. The Iron Lady should best be remembered as the Leather Lady. Indeed, today Thatcherism leaves its dreary imprint not only on the Conservative Party but---thanks also to Tony Blair---on a Labor Party that accepts most of her regressive policies."

"The Prime Minister whose social background Wilson's most resembles is not Edward Heath or John Major, still less Jim Callaghan (all Southerners from differing tribes), but Margaret Thatcher. In key respects, the early lives of the two leaders were remarkably similar. Both were brought up in or near middling English industrial towns. Both came from disciplined, Church-based families and had parents who valued learning, while having little formal education themselves... Both were Nonconformists... Both Alfred and Herbert [Wilson] began in the Liberal Party, the characteristic political home of provincial Nonconformity, before moving in contrary directions when the Liberals fell apart in the 1920s... There were, however, two differences which greatly influenced the outcome. First, Harold and Margaret were not contemporaries. Margaret was nine and a half years Harold's junior, and from that gap huge differences in outlook arose. Secondly, Alfred Roberts was a self-employed man, while Herbert was an employee. Harold spent his adolescence and early manhood during the worst years of the depression... By contrast, Margaret entered her teens and became politically conscious only as the depression came to an end. Alfred Roberts suffered during the hard times, but never badly. Where Harold's youthful experience was of financial uncertainty caused by factors outside the family's control, Margaret's memory was of a solid certainty, the product, as she believed, of her father's efforts and prudence."

"Margaret Thatcher, when we first became aware of her, was middle class mimsy... What she's done over the years progressively is in fact get sexier, and much more powerful. The fabrics are richer, there's more bulk. She's adopted what most Englishwomen find very frightening, which is a sort of hard-edged French chic...there's a certain sort of unforgivingness to it, a certain arrogance. She has discovered for herself a sort of power dressing... Rather like a Holbein painting of Henry VIII, here was a figure which was saying: "I am powerful." What Margaret Thatcher is doing...is expressing power in dress... I think Margaret Thatcher is a ruler, who thinks of herself as a ruler... This is now expressed with...a complete confidence that this powerful person with an enormous presence is ME."

"The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the "Iron Lady". It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made."

"Is the right hon. Lady aware that the report has now been received from the public analyst on a certain substance recently subjected to analysis and that I have obtained a copy of the report? It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes?"

"When she trusts her instincts she's almost always right. When she stops to think she's all too often wrong."

"She reached out...to the provincial England of her childhood, constructing an alternative national epic in which there was a merchant-adventurer in every counting-house, a village Hampden in every store. As many commentators have pointed out, she spoke in the accents not of church but of chapel, and in her radical contempt for paternalism it is not difficult to find echoes of her Northamptonshire shoemaker forbears. Her version of Victorian values was of a piece with this, invoking the plebeian virtues of self-reliance and self-help rather than the more patrician ones of chivalry and noblesse oblige."

"Attacking by turns the Church of England, the higher civil service, the universities, the BBC and the bar, she did as much as the cultural revolution of the 1960s to destabilise the establishment and degentrify public life."

"Mrs Thatcher was the only philosophically interesting prime minister of my adult lifetime. As much by accident as by design she stumbled on issue after issue of high principle, where there were genuinely incompatible moral choices to be made... Attacking socialism as an evil, and casting doubt on the very idea of public service, she forced us to reaffirm – but also to rethink – the place of the collectivist idea in British life and politics and of the social services in civil society. Her ideas, though aligned to right-wing politics, have disturbing affinities to the radical individualism recently in vogue on the left."

"The popularity of Lady Thatcher (as she later became) was due in part to the clarity of her public statements and her ability to persuade the electorate that her convictions corresponded to their wishes – particularity in matters of taxation and opportunity. Her unpopularity among the intellectual and media élite was due both to her right-wing philosophy and to her confrontational approach to those who disagreed with her."

"To her supporters...Margaret Thatcher left Britain a renewed and invigorated force both at home and on the world stage. She reversed years of national decline. She made Britain again the essential ally of the United States, largely due to her personal relationship with President Reagan, and helped end the Cold War. She turned around the economy and finally tamed the over-powerful unions, who had protected their own interests at the expense of the country's well-being for far too long. She radically overhauled the British state, taking power away from bureaucrats and putting it in the hands of the electorate, who came to enjoy a wealth and a standard of living that they had never known before. On coming to power she found Britain in tatters, and she gave it back its pride and confidence. Her critics, however, are less kind. They point above all to her intensely divisive nature and question the efficacy of many of her policies. The "economic miracle" is largely a myth, they insist, suggesting that recovery was inevitable and that monetarism only prolonged the recession of the early 1980s. Even when recovery came it proved unsustainable and was over-egged by Lawson with her acquiescence, which then led to the harsh recession of the 1990s. While a few became rich under Mrs Thatcher, many missed out on growing prosperity, and the gap between the rich and the poor, and north and south, widened considerably."

"Thatcher could congratulate herself on being, in a very real sense, godmother to the Reagan–Gorbachev relationship."

"The entire foundation of the "ownership society" is based on new enclosures. And the contrived law to justify contemporary enclosures à la [Richard] Epstein is based on three falsifications...The third deliberate distortion is the reduction of public to individual. Public is used both for government as well as collective interests and community organizations. However, cowboy capitalism reduces society to individuals, and makes community disappear. Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as a society, there are only individuals. Ayn Rand has said there is no such entity as the public, since the public is merely a number of individuals."

"Mrs Thatcher is beginning to reflect a genuine English nationalist feeling, a deep feeling about the English and how they see themselves in terms of their own history."

"She is undoubtedly a most formidable communicator. She has the ability to take hold of complex issues and, if you like, simplify them, moralise them, according to her own bourgeois values, and to get them across. She's used it at every platform I've seen her on, from the House of Commons to a party conference, and above all on television and radio. Secondly, I think that she's sensed some of the kinds of moral considerations in politics that underlie people's political and economic attitudes, and I think she has articulated right-wing moral convictions in a more formidable and more committed way than any leader of the right in post-war Britain."

"She has an instant appraisal of what you are trying to suggest to her and if you haven't done your homework she'll kill you stone dead – not with words but with a look."

"Mr. Breivik, his writings suggest, would have been reluctant to describe himself as a fascist — a common feature of European far-right discourse. He wrote: "I equate multiculturalism with the other hate-ideologies: Nazism (anti-Jewish), communism (anti-individualism) and Islam (anti-Kaffir)." These ideas, it is important to note, were echoes of ideas in mainstream European neo-conservatism. In 1978, the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously referred to popular fears that Britain "might be swamped by people of a different culture." In 1989, Ms Thatcher asserted that "human rights did not begin with the French Revolution." Instead, they "really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity"— in other words, faith, not reason."

"I think her greatest achievement is to have made people believe that the impossible is possible. That the things which were said in 1979 to be beyond resolution, the problem of the trade unions for example, she boldly took it on and she did it. If politicians can learn that lesson from her, that there is no problem which is too big to be solved, then she's contributed something enormously important to our life."

"If one basic axiom controls the cosmos, it must be this: In a situation of infinity every possible condition occurs, not once, but an infinite number of times."

"It is difficult to exaggerate either the extent to which research underpins her authority and power or the liking she has for statistics of any sort. Knowledge is power, and she loves retaining almost any sort of knowledge, although with something more than the lawyer's ability to read rapidly and retain facts for only as long as is necessary for a case... It is this enquiring and researching mind, coupled with such a retentive memory and the ability to get to the very heart of the most complex of issues, which underpin her will and authority."

"Faced with a wilful woman armed with facts and figures, the intelligent question is how best to disarm her. Confronting her is easy; anyone can do that, and lose. Winning against her is the hard part. The best way is to approach her with an argument that is presented crisply and knowledgeably, then stick with it as she tries to find the weak spots. She is intolerant of intellectual slackness, of threadbare arguments and of poor advocacy. She enjoys a good, businesslike argument, provided it is based on solid facts. She always demands thorough research to back up cases, both her own and those of others; this is one of her strongest weapons in advancing her beliefs and objectives. The incautious Minister who fails to learn his Whitehall brief thoroughly will soon find that she has absorbed it in greater detail than he has – and that now she is using it against him. Politics and Government are very serious, professional business for her... Margaret Thatcher...prefers a good argument to a good joke."

"My impression still is that Mrs Thatcher has failed fully to grasp one of the clearest truths about British politics in the 20th century – the truth that the British people are not that much concerned about capitalism (though they are perfectly happy to accept its advantages); in the abstract, they do not understand or like it. They only become enthusiastic for it when it is presented in a patriotic context. Joe Chamberlain knew this; the last Conservative politician to have known it with perfection is Enoch Powell. After that came Margaret Thatcher. She also knows it. Why they like her is because she "speaks for Britain", not because she is a very good economist (though she is probably as bright as any of that bunch), but because she expresses the sentiments and prejudices of the British people."

"The other element in Thatcherism is supposed to be the wish to restore Britain as a great power in the world. By this Mrs. Thatcher does not mean primarily a power devoted to the preservation of its own interests. She belongs to that militant Whig branch of English Conservatism which took over when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940. This is to say that her view of foreign policy has a high moral content or, in other words, that she likes to devote herself to large and distant causes – the freedom of Afghanistan rather than the security of Ulster. She is suspicious about the Common Market, but seems prepared to swallow its consequences (e.g. the Single European Act) so long as the blame for them can be attributed to the Foreign Office. I believe that she went into the Falklands with reluctance and regret and that, having done so, she carried it off with a courage and skill of which no other Prime Minister, possibly including Churchill, would have been capable. In terms of theory, however, she has contributed nothing new to the discussion of Britain's role in the world. Margaret Thatcher is a great Prime Minister, great by virtue of her courage and by virtue of what ideologues would often, misguidedly, describe as her "low political cunning"."

"It was because she offered ‘earnest and practical dissent’ to progressive orthodoxy. Mrs Thatcher is the point at which all snobberies meet: intellectual snobbery, social snobbery, the snobbery of Brooks's, the snobbery about scientists among those educated in the arts, the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial, the snobbery of the South about the North, and the snobbery of men about women."

"In 1980 and 1981 Mrs Thatcher's team (but not the Cabinet) wrestled with the question of how to stop inflation. The new ingredient was courage. Other governments had enforced restraint or cut proposed spending increases. What was wholly exceptional was a government willing to persevere with, indeed intensify, deflationary measures while the bottom fell out of the market. Austerity in prosperity is merely prudent; austerity in adversity requires the courage to put all ordinary political considerations in temporary abeyance. It was this courage of economic liberalism of 1979, which marked out a new determination by government to govern. The new regime of 1979 had not involved any real test of political will, for economic liberalism was and is as uncontentious as any great reversal of assumptions can be. Few, in 1986, were still sighing for the price, wage, dividend and exchange controls of the 1970s. Changing the economic culture was the easy bit. Reducing inflation by a mixture of fiscal and monetary measures, a problem in financial technology, was a far more desperate business... If 1981 was crucial, which it was, it was as a triumph of political will, not of economic doctrine."

"Mrs Thatcher fits the rule that there are no bad Prime Ministers. She may lack Heath's architectonic sense, but more than makes up for it in persuasiveness and electioneering flair. She lacks Callaghan's fatalism, most certainly, but not his caution. She has Eden's wish to meddle, but with the energy to support it. If in many ways she is under-read, her appetite for official papers exceeds that of almost all her predecessors. Had she lost the 1987 election, she would have looked like a curious aberration; since she won, she will be seen as marking a change of epochs, whatever her individual qualities. Whatever the future holds, she will go down as one of history's great improbabilities. For the present, it is perhaps safest to assert that she is the only Prime Minister to cook for her private secretaries when they are working late. She may have slain yesterday's dragon, not today's: her battle was with an archaic union-based socialism, not a pervasive middle-class liberalism. Still, the dragon looked anything but slayable in 1975, and the work had to be done, with but few helpers in her own party. She may outlive the context which made her relevant, but in the process bequeath a broad national governing party. The measure of her achievement is that she has made Thatcherism unnecessary."

"Her strong points were her iron will. I've never known a will like it in politics and I've known a few politicians in my time in various countries. I've never known a man or woman faintly like her, she was as tough as they come, and anything that required guts and will she could do for you. Anything that required sensitivity, she couldn't, she had none."

"I see that you will make a competent inspector after all. You have a natural bent for subterfuge and deceit."

"My first impression of her was positive: there was absolutely no side to this woman. She treated officials like fully-fledged human beings who (at that stage of her premiership at least) were allowed their say... As you talked, the electric blue eyes bored into you, as if probing you for insincerities or fuzzy thinking. I liked the way she preferred plain speaking, even when she simplified things outrageously, and admired her "can-do" style. If you made your point with conviction and could prove you were right, she would take the argument, while avoiding any appearance of doing so. Watching her in action it struck me that she was composed of two vital elements: strong passions and a sharp intelligence. The trick, you soon learned, was to bring the two together."

"[She has a] patronising elocution voice [and] neat well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that's not exactly vulgar, just low. [It fills me with] a kind of rage."

"Brezhnev took Afghanistan. / Begin took Beirut. / Galtieri took the Union Jack. / And Maggie, over lunch one day, / Took a cruiser with all hands. / Apparently, to make him give it back."

"In Margaret Thatcher, however, Britain had a Prime Minister who was not going to allow peripheral circumstances to get in the way of grim reality... She was faced with making the final, historically momentous decision to permit us to go in and establish a beach-head [on the Falklands]... I am clear that this was easily the biggest single military decision she had to take... There may have been a few politicians, ministers or even servicemen who still doubted her resolve. But Margaret Thatcher never shirked a hard decision. And when asked for her verdict, just a few hours from now, she would not falter."

"On 8 April 2013, former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher died. Street parties broke out across the UK, particularly in working class areas and in former mining communities which were ravaged by her policies. Thatcher's legacy is best remembered for her destruction of the British workers' movement, after the defeat of the miners' strike of 1984-85. This enabled the drastic increase of economic inequality and unemployment in the 1980s. Her government also slashed social housing, helping to create the situation today where it is unavailable for most people, and private property prices are mostly unaffordable for the young. Thatcher also complained that children were "being cheated of a sound start in life" by being taught that "they have an inalienable right to be gay", so she introduced the vicious section 28 law prohibiting teaching of homosexuality as acceptable. Abroad, Thatcher was a powerful advocate for racism, advising the Australian foreign minister to beware of Asians, else his country would "end up like Fiji, where the Indian migrants have taken over". She hosted apartheid South Africa's head of state, while denouncing the African National Congress as a "typical terrorist organisation". Chilean dictator general Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the rape, murder and torture of tens of thousands of people, was a close personal friend. Back in Britain, Thatcher protected numerous politicians accused of paedophilia including Sir Peter Hayman, and MPs Peter Morrison and Cyril Smith. She also lobbied for her friend, serial child abuser Jimmy Savile, to be knighted despite being warned about his behaviour. Thatcher was eventually forced to step down after the defeat of her hated poll tax by a mass non-payment campaign."

"When she became leader of the Opposition in 1975...a meeting...was arranged... She won me over. The strength of her determination and the simplicity of her rational ideas uncluttered by intellectual confusion convinced me that she was the first party leader I had met, apart from Gaitskell, who might check Britain's slide and possibly begin to reverse it. She did not seem much like a Tory but she had the Tory Party to work for her, which was a useful start... Mrs Thatcher is a radical of practical Manchester Liberal descent. She believes that Marx and other economic theorists have not extinguished Adam Smith's truths... Mrs Thatcher has had to puncture illusions and force unpleasant facts on reluctant listeners dreaming of a lazy Utopia, agreeable but unobtainable."

"From Bad Boy of Music, on his life as a concert pianist:"

"From Bad Boy of Music, on dealing with unruly audiences:"

"The less a writer discusses his work—and himself—the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care."

"Gambling, in the ultimate study, stems from the passive, the submissive, the irresponsible in human nature; the gambler is one of an inferior lickspittle breed who turns himself belly-upward to the capricious deeds of Luck. Examine now the man of strength and action: he is never led by destiny. He drives on a decided course, manipulates the variables, and instead of submitting to the ordained shape of his life, creates a pattern to his own design."

"“Legality is the mathematics of social conduct,” said Magnus Ridolph. “It is equally as cogent as the mathematics of probability.”"

"Man had dominated the Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause. Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment. He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool."

"I suppose if you isolate yourself to such an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies."

"I can now report that the mathematics of the multiple focus are a most improbable thicket, and the useful service I enforced upon what I must call an absurd set of contradictions is one of my secrets. I know that thousands of scientists, at home and abroad, are attempting to duplicate my work; they are welcome to the effort. None will succeed. Why do I speak so positively? That is my other secret."