
Prime Minister's Questions (11 December 1980) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104460
First term as Prime Minister
The Times (26 April, 1976).
Prime Minister's Questions (11 December 1980) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104460
First term as Prime Minister
Radcliffe Commencement Address (16 June 1954), published as "The Illusion of Total Security" in The Atlantic Monthly, # 194 (August 1954)
Context: A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp out everything that could conceivably constitute a reflection of improper foreign influence in our national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside.
This sort of extremism seems to me to hold particular danger for a democracy, because it creates a curious area between what is held to be possible and what is really possible — an area within which government can always be plausibly shown to have been most dangerously delinquent in the performance of its tasks. And this area, where government is always deficient, provides the ideal field of opportunity for every sort of demagoguery and mischief-making. It constitutes a terrible breach in the dike of our national morale, through which forces of doubt and suspicion never cease to find entry. The heart of our problem, here, lies in our assessment of the relative importance of the various dangers among which we move; and until many of our people can be brought to understand that what we have to do is not to secure a total absence of danger but to balance peril against peril and to find the tolerable degree of each, we shall not wholly emerge from these confusions.
Letter to John Wilson Croker (30 September 1833), quoted in L. J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830, Vol. II (1884), p. 218
Interview with The Times (7 April 1981), p. 12.
Democratic candidate debates (9 December 2003)
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)
From the introduction to Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford, Vol. 3 (1847), p. lxii
1840s
The Election in November 1860 (1860)
2010s, 2016, April, Foreign Policy Speech (27 April 2016)