Margaret Thatcher quotes - page 5
The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.
Margaret Thatcher
We have to recover those islands, we have to recover them for the people on them are British and British stock and they still owe allegiance to the Crown and want to be British. We have to do what is necessary to recover those islands...When you stop a dictator there are always risks but there are great risks in not stopping a dictator. My generation learned that a long time ago.
Margaret Thatcher
We support the right of women to choose our own lives for ourselves. If women wish to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, politicians, we should have the same opportunities as men, more and more we do...But many women wish to devote themselves mainly to raising a family and running a home. And we should have that choice too. Very few jobs can compare in long-term importance and satisfaction with that of housewife and mother. For the family is the building block of society. It is a nursery, a school, a hospital, a leisure place, a place of refuge and a place of rest. It encompasses the whole of society. It fashions our beliefs. It is the preparation for the rest of our life. And women run it.
Margaret Thatcher
The bomb attack on the Grand Hotel early this morning was first and foremost an inhuman, undiscriminating attempt to massacre innocent unsuspecting men and women staying in Brighton for our Conservative Conference...But the bomb attack clearly signified more than this. It was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our Conference; It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty's democratically-elected Government. That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared, and the fact that we are gathered here now-shocked, but composed and determined-is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.
Margaret Thatcher
Home really was very small and we had no mod cons and I remember having a dream that the one thing I really wanted was to live in a nice house, you know, a house with more things than we had...We had not got hot water. We only had a cold water tap. We had to heat all the hot water in a copper. There was an outside toilet. So when people tell me about these things, I know about them.
Margaret Thatcher
The Labour Party has now been taken over by extremists...The Labour Party is now committed to a programme which is frankly and unashamedly Marxist, a programme initiated by its National Executive and now firmly endorsed by its official Party Conference. In the House of Commons the Labour Left may still be outnumbered, but their votes are vital to the continuance of Labour in office, and that gives them a strength out of proportion to their numbers. And make no mistake, that strength, those numbers, are growing. In the constituency Labour parties, in the Parliamentary Labour Party, in Transport House, in the Cabinet Room itself, the Marxists call an increasing number of tunes...let's not mince words. The dividing line between the Labour Party programme and Communism is becoming harder and harder to detect. Indeed, in many respects Labour's programme is more extreme than those of many Communist parties of Western Europe.
Margaret Thatcher
There are people in this country who are the great destroyers; they wish to destroy the kind of free society we have. They wouldn't have the freedom and the kind of society they wish to impose on us. Many of those people are in the unions. Many many people in the unions do not wish to strike, and I think many of those who struck in hospitals and in the ambulance service didn't wish to. I'm not suggesting that every strike is dominated by those, but a number are.
Margaret Thatcher
Our freedoms depended on our having independence, independence in the wage packet, and independence of the Government...If you rely always on a Government for your wage packet, then the source of your independence to fight that Government has gone...Already one person in four works in the public sector. This is more than enough, and we must stop the encroachment from going any further.
Margaret Thatcher
Europe' in anything other than the geographical sense is a wholly artificial construct. It makes no sense at all to lump together Beethoven and Debussy, Voltaire and Burke, Vermeer and Picasso, Notre Dame and St Paul's, boiled beef and bouillabaisse, and portray them as elements of a 'European' musical, philosophical, artistic, architectural or gastronomic reality. If Europe charms us, as it has so often charmed me, it is precisely because of its contrasts and contradictions, not its coherence and continuity.
Margaret Thatcher
There is no such thing as "safe” Socialism. If it's safe, it's not Socialism. And if it's Socialism, it's not safe. The signposts of Socialism point downhill to less freedom, less prosperity, downhill to more muddle, more failure. If we follow them to their destination, they will lead this nation into bankruptcy.
Margaret Thatcher
In a decision of the utmost gravity, Labour voted to give up Britain's independent nuclear deterrent unilaterally. Labour's defence policy-though "defence" is scarcely the word-is an absolute break with the defence policy of every British Government since the Second World War. Let there be no doubt about the gravity of that decision. You cannot be a loyal member of NATO while disavowing its fundamental strategy. A Labour Britain would be a neutralist Britain. It would be the greatest gain for the Soviet Union in forty years. And they would have got it without firing a shot.
Margaret Thatcher
