You want to keep more of the money you earn? I'm afraid that's very selfish. We shall want to tax that away. You want to own shares in your firm? We can't have that. The state has to own your firm. You want to choose where to send your children to school? That's very divisive. You'll send your child where we tell you.
Margaret ThatcherSocialists cry โPower to the peopleโ, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean - power over people, power to the State.
Margaret ThatcherThere are too many people who imagine that there is something sophisticated about always believing the best of those who hate your country, and the worst of those who defend it.
Margaret ThatcherI 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.
Margaret ThatcherThe acid test of politics is not what you say at the hustings, but what you actually do in government.
Margaret ThatcherThere are forces more powerful and pervasive than the apparatus of war. You may chain a man, but you cannot chain his mind. You may enslave him, but you will not conquer his spirit. In every decade since the war Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day will come when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks; the mortar crumbles; one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.
Margaret Thatcher