Margaret Thatcher Zitate

seite 7

„So etwas wier die Gesellschaft gibt es nicht. Es gibt nur einzelne Männer und Frauen und es gibt Familen. Keine Regierung kann existieren, ohne dass die Menschen zunächst für sich selbst sorgen.“

„Es stört mich nicht, was meine Minister sagen, solange sie tun, was ich ihnen sage.“

„Das Rückgrat ist bei manchen Politikern unterentwickelt – vielleicht weil es so wenig benutzt wird.“

„Wir bitten nicht die Gemeinschaft oder sonst jemanden um Geld. Wir wollen einfach unser eigenes Geld zurück.“

„Nicht einer würde sich an den Guten Samariter erinnern, wenn der nur gute Absichten gehabt hätte. Er hatte auch Geld.“

„Meinen Erfolg habe ich vor allem der zuverlässigen Unterstützung durch meinen Mann zu verdanken.“

„Wenn Sie in der Politik etwas sagen wollen, fragen Sie einen Mann. Wenn Sie etwas erledigen möchten, fragen Sie eine Frau.“

„Wenn Sie in der Politik etwas gesagt haben wollen, fragen Sie einen Mann. Wenn Sie etwas getan haben wollen, fragen Sie eine Frau.“

„Der Thatcherismus wird überleben, weil er eine Sache des gesunden Menschenverstandes ist.“

„Die Dame lässt sich nicht verbiegen.“

„Es ist nicht Sache eines Politikers, allen zu gefallen.“

„Folge nicht anderen, lass andere dir folgen.“

„Für mich bedeutete die Wiedervereinigung ein völlig verändertes Europa. Genau das ist eingetreten.“

„Wenn ich etwas in der Politik verabscheue, dann den Typ des Aals, der sich vor lauter Geschmeidigkeit am liebsten selbst in sein Hinterteil beißen würde.“

„Europa wurde von der Geschichte gegründet. Amerika von der Philosophie.“

„Konsens erscheint mir als ein Prozess des Überbordwerfens aller Überzeugungen, Prinzipien, Werte und Grundsätze.“

„Jede Frau, die versteht einen Haushalt zu führen, wird dem Verständnis des Problems, ein Land zu führen, näher sein.“

„Wenn man die Hälfte seines politischen Lebens mit stumpfsinnigen Angelegenheiten wie der Umwelt zu tun hatte, ist es aufregend, eine richtige Krise an der Hand zu haben.“

„So etwas wie eine Gesellschaft gibt es nicht.“

„Wir haben aufgehört, eine Nation auf dem Rückzug zu sein.“

„Rückzug ist manchmal eine erforderliche Taktik. Als dauerhafte Politik aber nagt er an der Seele.“

„Zweimal haben wir die Deutschen geschlagen. Jetzt sind sie wieder da.“

„Es ist doch klar: Ihr Deutschen wollt nicht Deutschland in Europa verankern. Ihr wollt den Rest Europas in Deutschland verankern.“

„Geld fällt nicht vom Himmel. Man muss es sich hier auf Erden verdienen.“

„Folge nie der Menge, nur weil du Angst hast, anders zu sein.“

„Ich verschwende keine Zeit auf Argumente.“

„Ich glaube nicht, dass es zu meinen Lebzeiten einen weiblichen Premierminister geben wird.“

„Man muss eine Schlacht oft mehr als einmal schlagen, ehe man sie gewonnen hat.“

„Toleranz lernt man am besten in der Ehe. Unverheiratete Politiker haben davon keine Ahnung.“

„Ich kämpfe, ich kämpfe, um zu gewinnen.“

„Ihr könnt umkehren, wenn ihr wollt. Die Lady wird nicht umkehren.“

„Halten Sie mal die Luft an.“

„So leicht sind wir nicht zu dominieren, wir bestimmt nicht.“

„Wenn ich mich noch mal entscheiden könnte, würde ich nicht wieder in die Politik gehen. Das hat meine Familie kaputtgemacht.“

„Wir fordern einen Großteil unseres Geldes zurück.“

“People from my sort of background needed Grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams and Anthony Wedgwood Benn.”

“When you stop selecting by ability you have to select according to some other inevitably less satisfactory criterion.”

“There is nothing new or unusual about the Tory commitment to protect the environment. The last thing we want is to leave environmental debts for our children to clear up…It's we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth—we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come. The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full.”

“Madame Chairman, I presume this is to sweep Britain clean of socialism”

“I don't think there will be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime.”

“No, I'm not a feminist… I think they've become too strident. I think they have done great damage to the cause of women by making us out to be something we are not. Each person is different. Each has their own talents and abilities, and these are the things you want to draw and bring out. You don't say: “I must get on because I'm a woman, or that I must get on because I'm a man”. You should say that you should get on because you have the combination of talents which are right for the job. The moment you exaggerate the question, you defeat your case.”

“But freedom without law is freedom only for the strong at the expense of the weak. Freedom without law is therefore no freedom, but rather anarchy or tyranny. Law is the bond of all civil society. We are not asking a favour of a man when we ask him to obey the law. Obedience of the rule of law is necessary for the continuance of liberty itself. Doubtless you will point out that laws have not always been just—indeed they have been very unjust. In South Africa that certainly has been the case. Thankfully, that is now being remedied. And alongside that, democracy has yet to be achieved.”

“The right hon. Gentleman [Neil Kinnock] leads a party which claims to support democracy but repudiates those miners who have voted democratically to remain at work and have done so in accordance with their union procedures. He leads a party which condemns violence in general but supports the mass picketing which inevitably ends in violence. He leads a party which has allied itself to the wreckers against the workers. The forces to which the right hon. Gentleman has lent his voice and support have no more love for parliamentary democracy than for the jobs and homes of those who oppose them. Sooner or later, when he has ceased to be of value to their purpose, they will turn on him, just as surely as they have turned on the police, on the steel workers, and on working miners and their families. There is only one word to describe the policy of the right hon. Gentleman when faced with threats, whether from home or abroad, and that word is appeasement. He will live to regret it. It is no policy for Britain.”

“What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.”

“It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members. Such is their calculated cynicism. This Government is not prepared to legitimise their cause by word or by deed. And we should be clear what that cause is. It is a dictatorship by force and by fear in Northern Ireland, and in the Republic. These men deny democracy everywhere; they seek power for themselves. Some people argue that the Government could make the problem go away. We can of course maintain and improve an already humane prison regime. But there is no point in pretending that this is what the PIRA want. They have remained inflexible and intransigent in the face of all that we have done because what they want is special treatment, treatment different from that received by other prisoners. They want their violence justified. It isn't, and it will not be.”

“We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag. We fought with the support of so many throughout the world: the Security Council, the Commonwealth, the European Community, and the United States. Yet we also fought alone – for we fought for our own sovereign territory.”

“Patched-up diplomatic solutions designed to answer the needs of the moment rarely last, and as they unravel they can actually make things worse.”

“Let me make one point about the hunger strike in the Maze prison. I want this to be utterly clear. There can be no political justification for murder or any other crime. The Government will never concede political status to the hunger strikers, or to any others convicted of criminal offences in the Province.”

“The West as a whole in the early 1990s became obsessed with a 'peace dividend' that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and sometimes soft-headed causes. Politicians forgot that the only real peace dividend is peace.”

“We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.”

“We will not take money in taxes from those who work hard and pay it out to those who don't. We are trying to roll back the tide of Socialism. We must get ‘stuck in’ and sort out our problems in our traditional British way instead of asking the Government to intervene every time. Intervening means taking from people who work jolly hard and just manage to live within their means and make a profit, money in extra tax to pay for those who don't.”

“I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.”

“We've beaten the Germans twice and now they're back!”

“Iraq has violated and taken over the territory of a country which is a full member of the United Nations. That is totally unacceptable and if it were allowed to endure then there would be many other small countries that could never feel safe…The fundamental question is this: whether the nations of the world have the collective will effectively to see that Security Council Resolution is upheld, whether they have the collective will effectively to do anything which the Security Council further agrees to see that Iraq withdraws and that the government of Kuwait is restored to Kuwait.”

“The point of having nuclear weapons is to deter a war of any kind. They have succeeded in doing so for the past 37 years. To be an effective deterrent a potential aggressor must believe that under certain circumstances such weapons will be used.”

“At one end of the spectrum are the terrorist gangs within our borders, and the terrorist states which finance and arm them. At the other are the Hard Left operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power and the apparatus of local government to break, defy and subvert the law.”

“If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it.”

“The main contribution one can make as a student to one's country in peace or wartime is to study hard and effectively.”

“I believe that the royal family are a focus of patriotism, of loyalty, of affection and of esteem. That is a rare combination, and we should value it highly.”

“Let me give you my vision. A man's right to work as he will to spend what he earns to own property to have the State as servant and not as master these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free economy. And on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.”

“(The Community Charge is) the flagship of the Thatcher fleet.”

“Don't be scared of the high language of economists and Cabinet ministers, but think of politics at our own household level. After all, women live in contact with food supplies, housing shortages, and the ever-decreasing opportunities for children, and we must therefore face up to the position, remembering that as more power is taken away from the people, so there is less responsibility for us to assume.”

“I have made it quite clear – and so did Mr Prior when he was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – that a unified Ireland was one solution. That is out. A second solution was confederation of two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out. That is a derogation from sovereignty.”

“I am not sure what is meant by those who say that the Party should return to something called "One Nation Conservatism". As far as I can tell by their views on European federalism, such people's creed would be better described as "No Nation Conservatism".”