Friday Filosophy v.09.09.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.09.09.2022

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC (née Roberts; 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013), was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. The longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, she was the first woman to hold that office. As prime minister, she implemented policies that became known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the “Iron Lady”, a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist, before becoming a barrister. She was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970–1974 government. In 1975, she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election to become Leader of the Opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom.

On becoming prime minister after winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high inflation and Britain’s struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an oncoming recession. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasized deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), the privatization of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Her popularity in her first years in office waned amid recession and rising unemployment. Victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her landslide re-election in 1983. She survived an assassination attempt by the Provisional IRA in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing and achieved a political victory against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984–85 miners’ strike.

Thatcher was re-elected for a third term with another landslide in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge (“poll tax”) was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not shared by others in her cabinet. She resigned as prime minister and party leader in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership. After retiring from the Commons in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher (of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire) which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords. In 2013, she died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel, London, at the age of 87.

A polarizing figure in British politics, Thatcher is nonetheless viewed favorably in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers. Her tenure constituted a realignment towards neoliberal policies in Britain, with the complicated legacy attributed to Thatcherism debated into the 21st century.

  • If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
  • The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.
  • Power is like being a lady… if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.
  • If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.
  • Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.
  • Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.
  • I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
  • Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
  • I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.
  • It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.
  • What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.
  • Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.
  • 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 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.
  • If my critics saw me walking over the Thames, they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.
  • 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.
  • It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.
  • 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.
  • Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.
  • 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.
  • Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists’ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.
  • 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. \
  • I owe nothing to Women’s Lib.

The time is now.

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