Top 350 Margaret Thatcher Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The Prime Minister is stealing our clothes but he is going to look pretty ridiculous walking around in mine.”

— Margaret Thatcher

202. “I never hugged him, I bombed him.”

— Margaret Thatcher

203. “Making change tolerable is one of the duties of Government.”

— Margaret Thatcher

204. “Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family, and the school.”

— Margaret Thatcher

205. “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.”

— Margaret Thatcher

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

— Margaret Thatcher

207. “I wouldn’t be worth my salt if I weren’t attracting some controversy and criticism. Everyone in the world who has done something in life has attracted criticism.”

— Margaret Thatcher

208. “I do believe that political arrangements which are based upon violence, intimidation and theft will eventually break down – and will deserve to do so.”

— Margaret Thatcher

209. “It must be a conviction Government. As Prime Minister I could not waste time having internal arguments.”

— Margaret Thatcher

210. “One of the things being in politics has taught me is that men are not a reasoned or reasonable sex.”

— Margaret Thatcher

211. “Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.”

— Margaret Thatcher

212. “And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark divisive clouds of Marxist socialism.”

— Margaret Thatcher

213. “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?”

— Margaret Thatcher

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

— Margaret Thatcher

215. “A democratic Europe of nation states could be a force for liberty, enterprise and open trade. But, if creating a United States of Europe overrides these goals, the new Europe will be one of subsidy and protection.”

— Margaret Thatcher

216. “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.”

— Margaret Thatcher

217. “We do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society.”

— Margaret Thatcher

218. “We shall take whatever action is necessary to contain the growth of the money supply. The government, unlike so many of its predecessors, will face up to economic realities.”

— Margaret Thatcher

219. “Once a woman is made man’s equal, she becomes his superior.”

— Margaret Thatcher

220. “We are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened.”

— Margaret Thatcher

221. “I still want to play in it, maybe when I absolutely think I have no chance of playing in it my view might change but I doubt it because it just doesn’t interest me.”

— Margaret Thatcher

222. “How thin is the crust of order over the fires of human appetite and the lust for naked power.”

— Margaret Thatcher

223. “I calculate that I was responsible for proposing the elevation to the Lords of some 214 of its present numbers.”

— Margaret Thatcher

224. “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.”

— Margaret Thatcher

225. “The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.”

— Margaret Thatcher

226. “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.”

— Margaret Thatcher

227. “No Western nation has to build a wall round itself to keep its people in.”

— Margaret Thatcher

228. “There are too few rich and too few profits.”

— Margaret Thatcher

229. “We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.”

— Margaret Thatcher

230. “I have never knowingly made a non-controversial speech in my life.”

— Margaret Thatcher

231. “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.”

— Margaret Thatcher

232. “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.”

— Margaret Thatcher

233. “I am an ally of the United States. We believe the same things, we believe passionately in the same battle of ideas, we will defend them to the hilt. Never try to separate me from them.”

— Margaret Thatcher

234. “I’ve learned one thing in politics. You don’t take a decision until you have to.”

— Margaret Thatcher

235. “The United States is contributing massively to the defence of Europe and we should be very grateful.”

— Margaret Thatcher

236. “There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.”

— Margaret Thatcher

237. “When government does its job properly people are free to do theirs.”

— Margaret Thatcher

238. “In those days one advantage of being a woman was that there was a basic courtesy towards us on which we could draw – something which today’s feminists have largely dissipated.”

— Margaret Thatcher

239. “Consensus: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?”

— Margaret Thatcher

240. “This lady is not for turning.”

— Margaret Thatcher

241. “I believe our way of life is infinitely superior for every human being than any which the Communist creed can offer.”

— Margaret Thatcher

242. “I will not stagger from expedient to expedient.”

— Margaret Thatcher

243. “I don’t want to fight any wars; if you can get them off before we get there, you do it, but off they go.”

— Margaret Thatcher

244. “I can’t help to spit nails when just thinking about Trade Unions.”

— Margaret Thatcher

245. “Let us never forget this fundamental truth: The State has no source of money other than the money people themselves earn.”

— Margaret Thatcher

246. “Russia is bent on world domination.”

— Margaret Thatcher

247. “My job is to stop Britain from going red.”

— Margaret Thatcher

248. “I believe that the royal family are a focus of patriotism, of loyalty, of affection and of esteem. That is a rare combination, and we should value it highly.”

— Margaret Thatcher

249. “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.”

— Margaret Thatcher

250. “Of course, to be a mother and a housewife is a vocation of a very high kind. But I simply felt that it was not the whole of my vocation. I knew that I also wanted a career. A phrase that Irene Ward, MP for Tynemouth, and I often used was that ‘while the home must always be the centre of one’s life, it should not be the boundary of one’s ambitions’.”

— Margaret Thatcher