669 Quotes by Margaret Thatcher

Gentlemen, if we don't cut spending we will be bankrupt. Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it in order to live. Should we withhold the medicine? No. We are not wrong. We did not seek election and win in order to manage the decline of a great nation.

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.

There are too few rich and too few profits.

Being powerful is a lot like being a woman: If you have to tell someone that you are, invariably, you are not.

There is no week, nor day, nor hour, when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance. Tyranny may always enter—there is no charm or bar against it.

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

If one generation is expected to carry an excessive burden on behalf of another, it will seek by every means to avoid it. It will either demand that past promises are broken, or it will not work, or it will not pay taxes, or the most talented people will leave. Socialist governments which have tried to tax 'till the pips squeak' have ample experience of that.

[When asked how it felt to be a female prime minister:] I don't know: I've never experienced the alternative.

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.