Quotes By Theresa May

In tough times, everyone has to take their share of the pain.

Tying money up for 40 years doesn't sound appealing when you are young.

It's always an interesting experience for a politician to be heard in silence, I have to say.

We are mandating forces to hold regular neighbourhood beat meetings. These meetings will give local people the chance to scrutinise the work of their local police.

National security is the first duty of government but we are also committed to reversing the substantial erosion of civil liberties.

Starting with the highest-risk countries, and focusing on the route to Britain that is widely abused, student visas, we will increase the number of interviews to considerably more than 100,000, starting next financial year. From there, we will extend the interviewing programme further across all routes to Britain, wherever the evidence takes us.

And it is crucial of course that chief constables are able to make decisions within their budgets about how they deploy their police officers to the greatest effect to ensure that they're able to do the job that the public want them to do.

There is nothing inevitable about crime and there is nothing inevitable about anti-social behaviour.

You don't think about it at the time, but there are certain responsibilities that come with being the vicar's daughter. You're supposed to behave in a particular way. I shouldn't say it, but I probably was Goody Two Shoes.

There's much more we can be doing in Parliament, we could be giving more power back to people at local government level, through local referendums.

Look, we constantly live looking at the issue of the threat of terrorism.

Just as the police review their operational tactics, so we in the Home Office will review the powers available to the police.

I'm not someone who feels anger on particular issues.

I think if you talk to anybody who would like to have had children... I mean, you look at families all the time and you see there is something there that you don't have.

We've got a first class leader at the moment. David Cameron is dealing with the issues that he was left by the last government very well indeed.

Uncontrolled, mass immigration displaces British workers, forces people onto benefits, and suppresses wages for the low-paid.

I'd personally like to see the Human Rights Act go because I think we have had some problems with it.

I'm not willing to risk more terrorist plots succeeding and more paedophiles going free.

Now there is a growing feeling, it's something that David Cameron led on actually, he said this some time ago, that MPs should not be voting on their own pay.

I think there is a break down of trust generally, between people and politicians. I think that's come about for a whole variety of reasons.

On gay adoption I have changed my mind.

I want a counter-terrorism regime that is proportionate, focused and transparent.

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act... about the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.

People feel that they're being required to meet all sorts of regulations and rules and requirements in their areas of work and MPs are not imposing those sort of restrictions on themselves.

We campaigned on the fact that we were going to have to take difficult decisions because of the state of the public finances. When we got into government we discovered that actually the public finances were in an even worse state than we thought.

It is quite widely known that I like shoes. This is not something that defines me as either a woman or a politician, but it has come to define me in the eyes of the newspapers. I wore a pair of leopard-print kitten heels to a Conservative Party Conference a few years ago and the papers have continued to focus on my feet ever since.

Sham marriages have been widespread; people have been allowed to settle in Britain without being able to speak English; and there have not been rules in place to stop migrants becoming a burden on the taxpayer. We are changing all of that.

If the police need more help to do their work, I will not hesitate in granting it to them.

I will be ruthless in cutting out waste, streamlining structures and improving efficiency.

I am a vicar's daughter and still a practising member of the Church of England.