Margaret Thatcher

We were told our campaign wasn't sufficiently slick. We regard that as a compliment.

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

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.

This lady is not for turning.

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 to have a touch of iron about you.

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

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.

What Britain needs is an iron lady.

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.

We Conservatives hate unemployment.

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.

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

It pays to know the enemy - not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.

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

People think that at the top there isn't much room. They tend to think of it as an Everest. My message is that there is tons of room at the top.

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.

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.

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.

I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.