All Quotes

"We all see these great calamities with different eyes, and so their impact upon us is different."

"The main contribution one can make as a student to one's country in peace or wartime is to study hard and effectively."

"Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group - and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. Eventually, in such a situation every will lose."

"Everyone had something unique to offer in life and their responsibility was to develop those gifts - and heroes come from all backgrounds."

"When you stop selecting by ability you have to select according to some other inevitably less satisfactory criterion."

"Those who use this country's great tradition of freedom of speech should not seek to deny that same freedom to others, especially to those who, like Mr Powell, spent their war years in distinguished service in the Forces."

"Many senior policemen put greater emphasis on maintaining 'order' than on upholding the law. In practice that meant failing to uphold the rights of individuals against the rule of the mob."

"For my part, I favour an approach to statecraft that embraces principles, as long as it is not stifled by them; and I prefer such principles to be accompanied by steel along with good intentions."

"We now know that bin Laden's terrorists had been planning their outrages for years. The propagation of their mad, bad ideology – decency forbids calling it a religion – had been taking place before our eyes. We were just too blind to see it. In short, the world had never ceased to be dangerous. But the West had ceased to be vigilant. Surely that is the most important lesson of this tragedy, and we must learn it if our civilisation is to survive."

"The habit of ubiquitous interventionism, combining pinprick strikes by precision weapons with pious invocations of high principle, would lead us into endless difficulties. Interventions must be limited in number and overwhelming in their impact."

"I should therefore prefer to restrict my guidelines to the following:"

"The West as a whole in the early 1990s became obsessed with a 'peace dividend' that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and sometimes soft-headed causes. Politicians forgot that the only real peace dividend is peace."

"Never believe that technology alone will allow America to prevail as a superpower."

"But if Saddam had been in a position credibly to threaten America or any of its allies – or the coalition's forces – with attack by missiles with nuclear warheads, would we have gone to the Gulf at all?"

"For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other's good intentions."

"Successful entrepreneurship is ultimately a matter of flair. But there is also a fund of practical knowledge to be acquired and, of course, the right legal and financial framework has to be provided for productive enterprise to develop."

"It is always important in matters of high politics to know what you do not know. Those who think they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge."

"Singapore's success shows us that:"

"All corporatism – even when practised in societies where hard work, enterprise and cooperation are as highly valued as in Korea – encourages inflexibility, discourages individual accountability, and risks magnifying errors by concealing them."

"My father, more perceptive than many, wryly commented that by the time I was an adult there might not be an Indian Civil Service to enter. He turned out to be right. I had to settle for British politics instead."

"Patched-up diplomatic solutions designed to answer the needs of the moment rarely last, and as they unravel they can actually make things worse."

"North Korea desperately needed the foreign currency which this lethal trade could bring; its role as chief 'rogue' reinforced its prestige among anti-Western states, near and far; and it could also hope at the right moment to extort new instalments of Danegeld from America and her allies."

"Constitutions have to be written on hearts, not just paper."

"You only have to wade through a metric measure or two of European prose, culled from its directives, circulars, reports, communiqués or what pass as debates in its 'parliament', and you will quickly understand that Europe is, in truth, synonymous with bureaucracy – to which one might add 'to', 'from' and 'with' bureaucracy if one were so minded."

"What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy."

"'Europe' in anything other than the geographical sense is a wholly artificial construct. It makes no sense at all to lump together Beethoven and Debussy, Voltaire and Burke, Vermeer and Picasso, Notre Dame and St Paul's, boiled beef and bouillabaisse, and portray them as elements of a 'European' musical, philosophical, artistic, architectural or gastronomic reality. If Europe charms us, as it has so often charmed me, it is precisely because of its contrasts and contradictions, not its coherence and continuity."

"Not that this appears to affect the intentions of the political-bureaucratic elite, which in Britain as elsewhere in Europe believes that it has an overriding mission to achieve European integration by hook or by crook and which is convinced that History (with an extra-large 'H') is on its side."

"The feminists hate me, don't they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison."

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

"I owe nothing to Women's Lib."

"Victorian values."

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

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

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

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

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

"I definitely believe Margaret Thatcher became a friend of Pinochet during the Falklands War, but I have a completely different vision of feminism and humanism, and could never believe that Margaret Thatcher was an icon of feminism. I do not think that she represents the values."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"."

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

"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."

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

"She was a tigress surrounded by hamsters."

"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."

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

"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."

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