A Quote by Hilary Mantel

What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.

Hilary Mantel

Quote Topics

Altruism Around Aside Collective Community Enemy Greedy Identification Like Made Margaret Nature Only Other Our Play Rally Set She Slay Thatcher Things Understood

Quote Author

Hilary Mantel
English - Writer
Born: July 6, 1952

Media hosts just talk about Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher and again miss the point. I was talking about AMERICAN culture, ladies and gentlemen. As I pointed out, if Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir, by the way, she didn't care, and Margaret Thatcher didn't care how she look like. If Margaret Thatcher were running for president today, as she was when she was the Iron Lady, we wouldn't have her mom doing television commercials telling us how wonderful she was when she was a kid and how nice she is.

Rush Limbaugh

In my immigrant family we revered Margaret Thatcher. She was aspiration personified. She understood what it took to smash the glass ceiling. She shared our values and she empathised with our experiences. She really was the first British Asian Prime Minister.

Alok Sharma

Margaret Thatcher made tough decisions. She put people out of work and she stood up to labor unions and she did a lot of things that I did not like.

Harvey Weinstein

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.

Phyllida Lloyd

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

Hilary Mantel

Mother Teresa was brilliant. She said, “I will never attend an anti-war rally. If you have a peace rally, invite me.” She knew. She understood the secret. Look what she manifested in the world.

Jack Canfield

One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.

Hilary Mantel

I was only 18 when I made 'A Taste Of Honey' in the city of Salford, where writer, Shelagh Delaney set it. She was about 19 when she wrote the play based on her experiences of life and what she observed in her community.

Rita Tushingham

Like all of us, there were many facets to Margaret Thatcher's personality. In private she was kind, thoughtful, charming. Very attentive to her interlocutors. She took time to be concerned - she knew all about my children and wife Mila and so on.

Brian Mulroney

I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she'd make mincemeat of you.

Salman Rushdie

I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game; otherwise, she'd make mincemeat of you.

Salman Rushdie

Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around - decisively - the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries.

Paul Johnson

When Margaret Thatcher was leader, she and Michael Heseltine were hardly soulmates, but she would not have allowed personal rivalry to take the heat off the Labour Party, whose own deep internal divisions are buried in other news now, nor would she have countenanced any attempt to have a show trial.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

The first of the Trainspotting crew to die. Out of the five of them like, Begbie, Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and [Margaret] Thatcher. Who'd have thunk she'd have been the first to go? She was the invisible author of the book, really. She created the conditions and the hubris whereby that whole culture flourished.

Irvine Welsh

Every argument that Margaret Thatcher ever made internationally didn't have a great deal to do with her contempt for Communism - she never really got into that. What she talked about was giving freedom to tens of millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe. She was an inspirational leader when it came to discussing her belief in freedom. More visceral and moral.

Brian Mulroney

Margaret Thatcher was pro-choice. She voted to decriminalize homosexuality. Was not profoundly religious. She was very liberal on social issues.

Phyllida Lloyd