Quotes from Margaret Thatcher

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.

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

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

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

Citizenship should be based on those who have a close and real relationship with this country and its inhabitants.

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

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

The first step in calculating which way to go is to find out where you are.

Leadership is about having principles. A leader must have a vision and principles that will endure for all time and must always be true to these principles, applying them to changing circumstances

If you are guided by opinion polls, you are not practicing leadership -- you are practicing followership.

If... many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

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

I wouldn't be worth my salt if I weren't attracting some controversy and criticism. Everyone in the world who has done something in life has attracted criticism.

Life's greatest reward is life itself

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.

Being prime minister is a lonely job... you cannot lead from the crowd.

You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

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.

Each generation has to stand up for democracy. It can't take anything for granted and may have to fight fundamental battles anew.

Success is having a flair for the thing that you are doing knowing that is not enough that you have got to have hard work and a sense of purpose.

Socialists have always spent much of their time seeking new titles for their beliefs, because the old versions so quickly become outdated and discredited.

Everything a politician promises at election time has to be paid for either by higher taxation or by borrowing.

No generation has a free hold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy-with a full repairing lease.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.