I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.

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

I’m not a good butcher but I’ve had to learn to carve the joint. People expect a new look.

To Ronnie: Well done, thou good and faithful servant,

One hopes to achieve the zero option, but in the absence of that we must achieve balanced numbers.

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s a day you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it.

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

must be allowed to return to his own country forthwith.

I don’t mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say.

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

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

When people are free to choose, they choose freedom

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any...

old, frail and sick.

Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends.

No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions – he had money too

[But even some leading politicians of the Right have had doubts:] Nothing is more insidious than a fashionable consensus, … Surely there is something logically suspect about a solution which is correct whatever the problem.

If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.

I’m not quite sure of his place in history. History will determine that.

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.

Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.

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

He will be missed not only by those who knew him and not only by the nation that he served so proudly and loved so deeply, but also by millions of men and women who...

We have become a grandmother

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

If you lead a country like Britain, a strong country, a country which has taken a lead in world affairs in good times and in bad, a country that is always reliable, then you have...

If it is once again one against forty-eight, then I am very sorry for the forty-eight.

The battle for women’s rights has been largely won.

When I’m out of politics I’m going to run a business, it’ll be called rent-a-spine

I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

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

Don’t follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.

I owe nothing to Women’s Lib

We have lost a great president and a great man, and I have lost a great friend,

I shan’t be pulling the levers there but I shall be a very good back-seat driver.

I’ve got a woman’s ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.

On my way here I passed a local cinema and it turned out you were expecting me after all, for the billboards read: The Mummy Returns.

The cocks may crow, but it’s the hen that lays the egg.

It used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone.

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

The woman’s mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine...

We didn’t have to do the minuets of diplomacy. We got down to business.

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

I have made it quite clear that a unified Ireland was one solution that is out. A second solution was a confederation of two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That...

Mr. Clarke played the King all evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the Ace.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

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.