Quotes By Margaret Thatcher

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

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

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

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

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

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

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.

I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.

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

Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists' morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.

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

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.

What Britain needs is an iron lady.

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

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.

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

I'm extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

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