Margaret Thatcher
Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.Collection: Hands
It's okay, Chancellor, you can touch them. Sometimes I just strip down to a tank top and stare at these guns in front of a mirror all day long.Collection: Gun
Tyranny must not prevail.Collection: Tyranny
I remain totally convinced that when children are young, however busy we may be with the practical duties inside the home, themost important thing of all is to devbote enoughh time and care to their needs and problems.Collection: Children
To accuse me of being too inflexible is poppycock.Collection: Conviction
They are all a rotten lot. Schmidt and the Americans and we are the only people who would do any standing up and fighting if necessary.Collection: Fighting
For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" that I really came to think this principle as having wider application.Collection: Reading
If we are safe today, it is because America has stood with us. If we are to remain safe tomorrow, it will be because America remains powerful and self-confident. When, therefore, the Americans face difficulties, we need to say to them more clearly: We are with you.Collection: Powerful
As the former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once remarked – referring to the Russian proverb to the effect that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs – he had seen plenty of broken eggs, but never tasted any omelette.Collection: Eggs
In order to unscramble some eggs the leader gotta have some ballsCollection: Order
I'm not a good butcher but I've had to learn to carve the joint. People expect a new look.Collection: Government
The Russians put guns before butter. We put just about everything before guns.Collection: Gun
Let's make it clear: the Conservative Party has no plans for new NHS charges.Collection: Party
Socialism is in no way a curate's eggCollection: Eggs
We introduced the Community Charge. I still call it that. I like the Poles - I never had any intention of taxing them.Collection: Community
The Prime Minister is stealing our clothes but he is going to look pretty ridiculous walking around in mine.Collection: Clothes
I am not one who, to quote an American author, believes that democracy and enterprise have finally won the battle of ideas - that we have therefore arrived at the end of history, and there is nothing left to fight for. That would be unutterably complacent, indeed foolish. There will always be threats to freedom, not only from frontal assaults, but more insidiously by erosion from within.Collection: Believe
It seems like cloud cuckoo land. If anyone is suggesting that I would go to Parliament and suggest the abolition of the Pound Sterling - no! We have made it quite clear that we will not have a single currency imposed upon us.Collection: Clouds
I don't want to fight any wars; if you can get them off before we get there, you do it, but off they go.Collection: War
... when a big man has a big idea I never like to stand in his way.Collection: Men
I couldn't live without work. That's what makes me so sympathetic towards those people who are unemployed. I don't know how they live without working.Collection: People
I think, historically, the term 'Thatcherism' will be seen as a compliment.Collection: Thinking
Bribing regimes to comply with requirements which they should have acknowledged in the first place is not a process that appeals to me.Collection: Should Have
We're saying to anyone who dares to attack us, Do not do it, you couldn't win, the result would be devastating! I think you're saying the same.Collection: War
In those days one advantage of being a woman was that there was a basic courtesy towards us on which we could draw - something which today's feminists have largely dissipated.Collection: Feminist
This business of the working class is on its way out I think. After all, aren't I working class? I work jolly hard, I can tell you.Collection: Thinking
Today I have lost one of my dearest friends, England one of her greatest men. Keith Joseph understood that it was necessary to win again the intellectual argument for freedom, and that to do this we must start from first principles. He was in many ways an unlikely revolutionary. For all his towering intellect, he was deeply humble. He spoke out boldly, however hostile the audience. Yet he hated to give offence. Above all, his integrity shone out in everything he said and did. His best memorial lies in the younger generations of politicians whom he inspired. But for me he is irreplaceable.Collection: Lying
The Nuremburg trials were attacked at the time as 'victor's justice'. And this is precisely what they were - and were intended to be.Collection: Justice
John Gummer just did not have the political clout or credibility to rally the troops. I had appointed him as a sort of nightwatchman, but he seemed to have to sleep on the job.Collection: Jobs
The Iraqis had paid a terrible price for Saddam's folly (in the Gulf War). But looking at the devastation they left behind (in Kuwait), my sympathy was limited.Collection: War
It is recorded how towards the end of the eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to England was taken to see the House of Commons at work. He later wrote of his astonishment at finding the that the British Parliament actually made laws and fixed punishments for their infraction - because unlike Muslims the English had not accepted a divine law revealed from heaven and therefore had to resort to such unsatisfactory expedients. Muslims still understand the expression 'the rule of law' very differently than do most Westerners.Collection: Taken
I am always on the job.Collection: Jobs
President Numeiri of Sudan is said to have remarked of Gadaffi that he was 'a man with a split personality - both of them evil'.Collection: Men
If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification.Collection: Mets
My first guiding principle is this: willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.Collection: Independent
Please don't use the word tough. People might get the impression that I don't care. And I do care, very deeply. Resilient, I think.Collection: Thinking
We are very fortunate to have someone else's weapons stationed on our soil, to fight those targeted on us.Collection: Fighting
Our first duty to liberty is to keep our own. But it is also our duty - as Europeans - to keep alive in the Eastern as well as the Western half of our continent those ideas of human dignity which Europe gave to the world. Let us therefore resolve to keep the lamps of freedom burning bright so that all who look to the West from the shadows of the East need not doubt that we remain true to those human and spiritual values that lie at the heart of European civilization.Collection: Spiritual
It is absolutely right that President Reagan considers SDI and thank goodness people considered nuclear research before the last war.Collection: War
You know the critical thing with the Communist countries is Communism, which by definition consists of control by the government.Collection: Country
I want a capital-earning democracy. Every man and woman a capitalist. Housing is the start. If you're a man or woman of property, you've got something. So every man a capitalist, and every man a man of property.Collection: Men
One only gets to the top rung on the ladder by steadily climbing up one at a time, and suddenly, all sorts of powers, all sorts of abilities which you thought never belonged to you - suddenly become within your own possibility and you think, 'Well, I'll have a go, too.'Collection: Life
Their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles.Collection: War
There are some remarkable parallels between basketball and politics. Michael Jordan has already mastered the skill most needed for political success: how to stay aloft without visible means of support.Collection: Funny
The Government wants a peaceful settlement. But we totally reject a peaceful sell-out.Collection: Government
Some Socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals. We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else, however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.Collection: Believe
The accumulation of wealth is a process which is of itself morally neutral. True, as Christianity teaches, riches bring temptations. But then so does poverty.Collection: Temptation
The Kosovo campaign was a just and necessary war. And I believe that Blair - of whom I have many criticisms - in this case showed real determination in conducting it.Collection: Determination
We simply cannot delegate the exercise of mercy and generosity to others.Collection: Exercise