Margaret Thatcher quotes:

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.

If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

I like Mr. Gorbachev, we can do business together.

What Britain needs is an iron lady.

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.

There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as Quislings, as traitors... I mean it.

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well.

Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.

Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.

I love argument, I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that's not their job.

If you want to cut your own throat, don't come to me for a bandage.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

No woman in my time will be prime minister or chancellor or foreign secretary - not the top jobs. Anyway, I wouldn't want to be prime minister; you have to give yourself 100 percent.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

I don't mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say.

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

Being prime minister is a lonely job... you cannot lead from the crowd.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

I've got a woman's ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.

A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

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

Watch your thoughts for they become words.Watch your words for they become actions.Watch your actions for they become habits.Watch your habits for they become your character.And watch your character for it becomes your destiny.What we think, we become.My father always said that... and I think I am fine.

I am not one who, to quote an American author, believes that democracy and enterprise have finally won the battle of ideas - that we have therefore arrived at the end of history, and there is nothing left to fight for. That would be unutterably complacent, indeed foolish. There will always be threats to freedom, not only from frontal assaults, but more insidiously by erosion from within.

I am an undiluted admirer of American values and the American dream and I believe they will continue to inspire not just the people of the United States but millions across the face of the globe.

Their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles.

For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think this principle as having wider application.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.

I have very strong views about Europe. We're quite the best country. We rescued them. We're not going to get entangled with them. We've got to keep our own independence. Is that clear?

I believe in the acceptance of personal responsibility, freedom of choice, and the British Empire, which took freedom and the rule of law to countries which would never have known it otherwise.

The messages on our banners in 1979 - freedom, opportunity, family, enterprise, ownership - are now inscribed on the banners in Leipzig, Warsaw, Budapest and even Moscow.

Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

We were told our campaign wasn't sufficiently slick. We regard that as a compliment.

Isn't a policy of conventional weapons, with the terrible bombs raining down, with the missiles, with the aircraft, with the submarines, with the torpedoes, with the tanks, with chemical weapons - isn't that based on the possibility of threat?

I do wish I had brought my cheque book. I don't believe in credit cards.

We should not expect the state to appear in the guise of an extravagant good fairy at every christening, a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey, and the unknown mourner at every funeral.

Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends." ~ (1925- ), English political leader.

I applaud strong government, but not overweening government sustained by cronies, ciphers and a personality cult.

In the Conservative Party we have no truck with outmoded Marxist doctrine about class warfare. For us it is not who you are, who your family is or where you come from that matters, but what you are and what you can do for your country that counts.

John Gummer just did not have the political clout or credibility to rally the troops. I had appointed him as a sort of nightwatchman, but he seemed to have to sleep on the job.

If... many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

When others spoke of the fear of war, you spoke of the need for warriors and peace through strength. When others bewailed the failure of big government to provide for the collective good, you spoke of self-reliance, of personal responsibility, of individual pride and integrity. When others preached compromise - when others demanded compromise, you, Ronald Reagan, preached conviction.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

Good Conservatives always pay their bills. And on time. Not like the Socialists who run up other people's bills.

What happened in Russia in 1917 wasn't a revolution - it was a coup d'etat.

...Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world's population and defending it for most of the rest.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

It seems like cloud cuckoo land. If anyone is suggesting that I would go to Parliament and suggest the abolition of the Pound Sterling - no! We have made it quite clear that we will not have a single currency imposed upon us.

Being democratic is not enough, a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right. In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the rule of law.

When in August 1793 a British delegation showed their hosts a terrestrial globe, it turned into a diplomatic incident, for the Chinese were furious to see that their empire covered so little of it. For centuries the Chinese had thought of themselves as 'The Middle Kingdom', that is the centre of the civilized world. To see otherwise was a shock.

Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society -- from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's a day you've had everything to do and you've done it.

Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life. ... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.

I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.

There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

I think Essex Man will vote for a Conservative Government.

If a woman like Eva Peron with no ideals can get that far, think how far I can go with the ideals that I have.

People think that at the top there isn't much room. They tend to think of it as an Everest. My message is that there is tons of room at the top.

Occupied Falklands are the thorn in my balls

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

They [Federalist European Politicians] divide their time between court room, prison and debating chamber - giving a whole new meaning to the term 'conviction politician'.

If you are guided by opinion polls, you are not practicing leadership -- you are practicing followership.

In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.

It took us a long time to get rid of the effects of the French Revolution 200 years ago. We don't want another one.

You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.

[On George H.W. Bush:] By 1990 I had learned that I had to defer to him in conversation and not to stint the praise. If that was what was necessary to secure Britain's interests and influence, I had no hesitation in eating a little humble pie.

If you lead a country like Britain, a strong country, a country which has taken a lead in world affairs in good times and in bad, a country that is always reliable, then you have to have a touch of iron about you.

I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.

Both the President and Mr Gorbachev have said that they want to see a world without nuclear weapons. I cannot see a world without nuclear weapons. Let me be practical about it. The knowledge is there to make them. So do not go too hard for that pie in the sky because, while everyone would like to see it, I do not believe it is going to come about.

The role of Ronald Reagan had been deliberately diminished; the role of the Europeans, who, with the exception of Helmet Kohl, were often keen to undermine America when it mattered, had been sanitized; and the role of Mr. Gorbachev, who had failed spectacularly in his declared objective of saving communism and the Soviet Union, had been absurdly misunderstood.

I cannot imagine how any diplomat, or any dramatist, could improve on (Ronald Reagan's) words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva summit: 'Let me tell you why it is we distrust you.' Those words are candid and tough and they cannot have been easy to hear. But they are also a clear invitation to a new beginning and a new relationship that would be rooted in trust.

We have become a grandmother.

I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.

There are dangers in consensus: it could be an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything. ... No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do.

Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.

It is important not to allow ever wider coalition-building to become an end in itself. As we saw in the Gulf War of 1990, international pressures, particularly those exerted from within an alliance, can result in the failure to follow actions through and so leave future problems unresolved.

The Iraqis had paid a terrible price for Saddam's folly (in the Gulf War). But looking at the devastation they left behind (in Kuwait), my sympathy was limited.

Women have plenty of roles in which they can serve with distinction: some of us even run countries. But generally we are better at wielding the handbag than the bayonet.

When hecklers stand up, I get a mental jump for joy. It gives me something to get my teeth into - and the audiences love it.

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.

Please don't use the word tough. People might get the impression that I don't care. And I do care, very deeply. Resilient, I think.

Those who imagine that a politician would make a better figurehead than a hereditary monarch might perhaps make the acquaintance of more politicians.

People constantly requesting government intervention are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.

If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it.

The woman's mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities.

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.

There is a nonsense about intelligent women not being beautiful.

I'm standing up for the right of self-determination. I'm standing up for our territory. I'm standing up for our people. I'm standing up for international law. I'm standing up for all those territories - those small territories and peoples the world over - who, if someone doesn't stand up and say to an invader 'enough, stop', would be at risk.

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.

While the Soviet Union has imposed its rule on its neighbours and drawn an iron curtain between east and west, we in Great Britain have given freedom and independence to more than forty-eight countries whose populations now number more than a thousand million - a quarter of the world's total.

There's no such thing as society.

I never hugged him, I bombed him.

It's the Labour Government that have brought us record peacetime taxation. They've got the usual Socialist disease - they've run out of other people's money.

I might have preferred iron, but bronze will do. It won't rust. And, this time I hope, the head will stay on.

Any leader has to have a certain amount of steel in them, so I am not that put out being called the Iron Lady.

Israel must never be expected to jeopardize her security: if she was ever foolish enough to do so, and then suffered for it, the backlash against both honest brokers and Palestinians would be immense - 'land for peace' must also bring peace.

Let us, then, draw together in the name, not of jingoism, but of justice

I'm either the witch or Lady Macbeth of English politics, but someone gotta wear the pants in England when others wearing kilts

We should see to it that our people are steeped in a real knowledge and understanding of our national culture.

There are significant differences between the American and European version of capitalism. The American traditiionally emphasizes the need for limited government, light regulations, low taxes and maximum labour-market flexibility. Its success has been shown above all in the ability to create new jobs, in which it is consistently more successful than Europe.

No generation has a free hold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy-with a full repairing lease.

We do not have a freehold on the earth, only a full repairing lease

No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect. ... To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.

The legal system we have and the rule of law are far more responsible for our traditional liberties than any system of one man one vote. Any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law.