Top 280 Thatcher Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

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.

I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.

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.

Margaret was the best prime minister of my lifetime. Mythology has turned Thatcher into someone regarded either as a goddess by her supporters or an evil witch by her opponents.

[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

I hate to say it because I voted against everything Thatcher did, but she had principles she believed in.

I think it's essential for comic writers to have a hate figure, a despot, a regime to react against, and I think Thatcher was perfect for me, I loathed everything she stood for.

What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.

[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.

It is good to see women doctors and lawyers and executives. I can visualize a woman president. If I were British, I would have supported Margaret Thatcher. But no benefit to anyone can come from women serving in combat.

My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.

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

Once upon a time - in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major - I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's victory fills me with fear and foreboding.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.

Yeah, I did need a lot of breath [to play Margaret Thatcher]. I needed much more breath than I have, after all of my expensive drama school training. I couldn't keep up with her.

The most influential person in Europe in the last 20 to 30 years has been Margaret Thatcher. Without her we'd all be living in some French bloody unemployed republic.

Her iron will won international respect. Her unabashed femininity gained women's. Margaret Thatcher was a lady's lady.

The Establishment decided Thatcher's ideas were safer with a strong Blair government than with a weak Major government. We are given all these personalities to choose between to disguise the fact that the policies are the same.

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.

If you're dealing with a powerful leader, you're inevitably going to have a dialogue with her political past. It was always my intention to interrogate Thatcher's political life.

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.

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.

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.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.

My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.

I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.

'Eureka' was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn't be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.

As a young woman, I was fortunate to have the leadership of Jeanette Hayner, the courage of Jennifer Dunn, the faith of Elisabeth Elliot, and the indomitable spirit of Margaret Thatcher to guide and motivate me.

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

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.

So all the system was running down and collapsing. Mrs. Thatcher became the leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, and she clearly wanted to strike out and do something different.

One of the reasons that Thatcher promoted home ownership is that it promoted responsible citizens with a stake in society. But another reason was that those people would tend to be Conservative.

Margaret Thatcher - this great lady has not only served her country well, she has served the free world well.

I grew up under Thatcher; the era of apartheid; the era of the poll tax; the era of riots. I remember Neil Kinnock was a hero.

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] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!

Taken slightly historically, the turning point in the E.U. was actually the Single European Act, the Thatcher/Maastricht-era stuff, which was turning the E.U. into very much a market system.

Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots - yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her.

I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs. Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours.

If you aspired and wanted to get on in life, as so many immigrants families did, Margaret Thatcher was your champion, your role model, your heroine.

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.

On December 22, 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have set my sights on the millennium and a world where we are all equal.

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.

When I become prime minister, I'm going to buy one of those Margaret Thatcher handbags, and I'll bang it on the table and demand my money back from the government for past bad services.

Spare me this sanctimony about politeness, please. There are millions of people in this country who hate the very word 'Thatcher' and 'Thatcherism,' which continues until this day.

We've never considered ourselves overtly political, but when it comes to English politics - people like Margaret Thatcher - you cannot just stand by and ignore all that's happening around us.

Margaret Thatcher was a great leader for her nation at a pivotal and a perilous time. So, I find the comparison flattering, but that's up to others to say whether that comparison is justified.

[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.

[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

Anything I could have done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher's government out I was prepared to do. I could not believe what she was doing to this country.

[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.

Mrs Thatcher not only made history by becoming Britain's first female prime minister, she was the first woman to hold any comparable position in the western world.

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.'

The danger with Margret Thatcher is that when she speaks without thinking she says what she thinks.

The Leave campaign claims we send £350 million a week to Europe. This is untrue. When you take into account the rebate Margaret Thatcher got for us and the money we get back in E.U. funding, the true figure is nowhere near that.

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

Thatcher was wrong. People don't exist - well, they don't flourish - as individuals. Life's about swapping ideas and communicating with other people.

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.

When I was a boy during Thatcher, you watched elections and wept in disbelief as the whole country turned blue, Scotland turned red, and we still got the Tories.

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.