Margaret Thatcher

The new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes.

What has happened this winter could happen again next winter and so on and so on. What we face is a threat to our whole way of life. The case is now surely overwhelming, there will be no solution to our difficulties which does not include restriction on the power of the unions.

Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.

The battle for women's rights has been largely won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone for ever. And I hope they are. I hated those strident tones that you still hear from some Women's Libbers.

No matter how hard they try, totalitarian countries can never extinguish the flame of freedom. Again and again, we see the evidence that if only the nations of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose, they would choose democracy and freedom.

Many of Islam's ideals are not compatible with democracy, and that could be a great factor for instability and conflict in future. So don't conclude that the world is safe for democracy, it isn't.

We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state.

To be utterly clear about the hunger strike in the Maze prison: 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.

Idleness, selfishness, fecklessness, envy, & irresponsibility are vices upon which socialism in any form flourishes & which it in turn encourages. But its devilishly clever tactic is to play up to all these human failings, while making those who practise them feel good about it.

Time and again history beats out the same message. Competition is better for the consumer than State control.

It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken.

What strikes me is the shameless appeal to voters to accept our national decline as inevitable, and simply to make the best of it. Labour's campaign slogan should be: "Coast downhill with Labour".

I do not regard society as polarised. Indeed, it is not. The commentators like to try to make it so, but it is not. The greater part of society is ... believes in orderly freedom. It totally and utterly rejects extremes.

Perhaps the single greatest imperative in the Western world today is to reassess our defence requirements on cold, realistic and even pessimistic assumptions and to apply ourselves urgently to fill the gaps.

You must have a government which believes very passionately in what it wants to do, is very strong in its sense of purpose and does not listen to siren voices.

We must take with us into the 1990s the lessons of the decade we are leaving behind. And the overwhelming lesson is that Socialism has failed.

The writings of Solzhenitsyn made obvious even to the wilfully blind that it was not simply Stalin who was an evil man, but that communism, in practice, is an evil system, which gave birth to Stalin.

The Russians put guns before butter. We put just about everything before guns.

A country's top rate of tax is a symbol. Very little revenue is collected from people in this country who pay tax at the highest rates. A top rate of 83 per cent is not much of a revenue raiser, it is the symbol of British socialism - the symbol of envy. (1978 speech)

There is nothing new about the Tory commitment to protect the environment. The last thing we want is to leave environmental debts for our children... It's we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth - we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come.