Top 111 Thatcher Quotes

When women get great roles in life, they start to get great roles in films and TV. Look at Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright, and Mrs. Thatcher. Because those images are coming at us in life, they are reflected in acting.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

Just as the England football manager starts with bells and flags and balloons and ends up reviled, so do prime ministers. Tony Blair – is there anyone more despised now? Gordon Brown – all right, nobody voted for him but, you know… just think of any of them. Margaret Thatcher. John Major. Steve McLaren. Fabio Capello.

Among other things they picked out a detail that Charles had been offered the Governorship of Hong Kong in its dying days by Thatcher in return for shutting up about the inner cities. He quite rightly in my view led the paper on this story.

I don’t want to be an old man in a pub singing about Margaret Thatcher.

I think Margaret Thatcher was a superstar in this country, and I think we all felt we needed a superstar to play her, somebody of huge intelligence, passion, and power and warmth.

The American Revolution was sparked by a series of taxes and tariffs on tea. More recently, the Thatcher and Reagan ‘revolutions’ were rooted in overturning the status quo – excessive taxation – to empower the individual and encourage a free society and prosperous economy.

I don’t think the standard of our politicians is very high. And when you get good ones, world-class ones, like a Blair or a Brown or a Thatcher, then they do stand out – they are head and shoulders above everybody else.

Margaret Thatcher was fearful of German unification because she believed that this would bring an immediate and formidable increase of economic strength to a Germany which was already the strongest economic partner in Europe.

Since the start of the Thatcher economic and fiscal reforms the U.K. economy has expanded five-fold.

Margaret Thatcher always felt like an outsider in her party.

I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, ‘The Grocer’s Daughter.’

One of the things I’ve learned from ‘Borgen’ is that it’s very easy to criticise people; ‘I hate this politician, I hate what they do.’ You are doing this right now with Margaret Thatcher, but sometimes it’s hard to be a politician. I’m not defending Margaret Thatcher, but we believe our statesmen are also human beings.

I grew up in Mill Hill. All potteries, mining. Then once Maggie Thatcher closed the pits down, it became a bit depressed.

By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher was prepared to destroy the world rather than give in on something she believed in.

The women’s movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.

In the U.S. – and elsewhere – successful parties need a storyline that voters can relate to, an intelligible plot of some sort, especially now that so many older, formal ideologies have lost force. For proof of this, one has only to look at Margaret Thatcher’s career and ideas.

Margaret Thatcher, growing up in a bombed and battered Britain, derived a distrust which has grown with the years not just of Germany but of all continental Europe.

I need to be in charge, and that comes from when I was growing up and money was always an issue. I didn’t want to feel the fear of poverty again, and I suppose, in that way, I qualify as Thatcher Youth.

Scotland never voted for Margaret Thatcher.

For us she is not the iron lady. She is the kind, dear Mrs. Thatcher.

If there is a better singer in England than Craig David, then I am Margaret Thatcher.

As a woman, I think Margaret Thatcher felt she had to be ten times more prepared than the men.

From the start of her leadership of the Conservative party in February 1975, Thatcher’s style seemed shrill and uncompromising, and she became an easy object of mockery. When she left office nearly 16 years later, she was a widely recognised, but clearly still highly controversial, figure.

2018 marks 30 years since Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced Section 28, one of its most abominable policies. As a part of the Local Government Act, this Section was designed to prevent local authorities and schools from the so-called promotion of LGBT+ issues.

In the 1980s, I had a lot of films, documentaries for television, which were about why the trade unions had failed to organize resistance to Margaret Thatcher’s plans. And they were banned. I had to fight for those films.

The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution – even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher’s strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary.

This is the first generation to grow up on Thatcher – it’s a different ethos. It’s money minded, and it’s the cult of yourself. Now that’s fine, except when it falls down, and you can’t achieve your goals – through high unemployment, through the fact that you probably need inherited money to get anywhere.

I grew up in London under Thatcher and that really was disgusting. A feeding frenzy.

I admired Margaret Thatcher – while abhorring much of what she offered – because she was so clearly a leader of huge substance. Blair was the dismal opposite.

Margaret Thatcher was very good for the arts in so far as it gave people a real focus for something to be against.

While Labour Party orators readily remember the 1980s for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s free-booting variety of entrepreneurial meritocracy, what gets forgotten is that Thatcher also gave the heave-ho to the old establishment’s notion of merit – good breeding, a posh school, and so on.

In the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.

Margaret Thatcher was a 20th century visionary who understood the power of individual freedom versus the tyranny of government collectivism. She was a loyal supporter and friend of the United States and her terms as prime minister were marked as the beginning of the resurgence of the economy of the United Kingdom.

In a way, the debate about Margaret Thatcher in Britain has just gotten fossilized in this notion that she is either this she-devil who wrecked the industrial base of the country and ruined the lives of millions, or she is the blessed Margaret who saved the nation and rescued us from our post-war decline.

Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn’t looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.

Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.

Thatcher came under pressure from right wing backbenchers to shut up the Prince of Wales and there was a deal done between them where he did actually shut up in the end.

Britain’s done a lot of changing in the past 50 years. The decline of manufacturing and heavy industry under Margaret Thatcher ripped the economic heart out of huge swathes of the country, and dramatically transformed class composition.

I would say that New Labour come closer to institutionalising neoliberalism as a social and political form than Thatcher did.

David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher.

I think my parents knew before I did that I was going to be an actress, because I was doing impressions of Margaret Thatcher at the age of four.

In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone’s eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that.

When I was at Oxford, I was a Thatcher child; I was fascinated by politics and I spent three years being obnoxious in the Oxford Union.

Mrs. Thatcher was a powerful figure at the time I was a student in London. And I admire her versatility and strength.

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

I hated what Margaret Thatcher had done. How she’d taken jobs. I hated her divide and rule politics.

If Hillary’s the first woman president, well, in England we already know what a Margaret Thatcher is. It’s not an end unto itself to be the first woman president.

One of the most important things that a Thatcher government did was change the mood of the nation to give it back its confidence.

There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.