Consensus is the negation of leadership.
If it’s me against 48, I feel sorry for the 48.
All corporatism – even when practised in societies where hard work, enterprise and cooperation are as highly valued as in Korea – encourages inflexibility, discourages individual accountability, and risks magnifying errors by concealing them.
Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.
Our aim is to make tax collecting a declining industry.
When you take into public ownership a profitable industry the profits soon disappear. The goose that laid the golden eggs goes broody. State geese are not great layers.
You cannot make an omelet without breaking some balls.
Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.
The woman’s mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities.
Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.
I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.
First you win the argument, then you win the vote.
You do not achieve anything without trouble, ever.
Young people ought not to be idle, it is very bad for them.
Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.
Women have plenty of roles in which they can serve with distinction: some of us even run countries. But generally we are better at wielding the handbag than the bayonet.
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.
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.
To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.