Margaret Thatcher's most reliably sourced quotes come from three kinds of record: a full speech transcript, an official parliamentary transcript, and a televised interview. "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning," the Hansard "No. No. No.," and her Bruges Speech warning against "a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels" all check out against primary or near-primary transcripts. Two of her most famous lines — "there is no such thing as society" and the "other people's money" line — are genuine, but only in their full, exact wording; both get flattened into something she didn't quite say. Here they are in the order the occasions came.
1976: The line about other people's money
In a Thames TV interview for This Week on 5 February 1976, Thatcher told Llew Gardner:
"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 much-repeated short form — "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money" — is a later compression of this sentence, not a second, separate verbatim quote. If you see it presented as an exact quote from a specific date, treat it as paraphrase.
1980: "Not for turning"
Facing pressure to reverse her economic policy, Thatcher told the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton on 10 October 1980:
"You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning."
It became the title the speech is remembered by.
1987: "There is no such thing as society" — in full
This is the line most often quoted wrong. In her 1987 interview for Woman's Own, Thatcher said:
"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families... It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour."
Quoted as a standalone fragment, the first sentence sounds like a denial that people owe each other anything. Read with the sentences that follow it, her point runs the other way: obligation runs through individuals and families rather than through an abstraction called "society."
1988: The Bruges Speech
Addressing the College of Europe on 20 September 1988, she set out her resistance to further centralisation in Brussels:
"We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels."
1990: "No. No. No."
Her 30 October 1990 statement to the House of Commons on the Rome European Council — reporting how Commission President Jacques Delors wanted the European Parliament, Commission, and Council of Ministers reshaped — is preserved in the official Hansard record:
"No. No. No."
The statement is widely credited as the proximate trigger for Geoffrey Howe's resignation, which in turn opened the leadership challenge that ended her premiership three weeks later.
Where "Iron Lady" came from
At Kensington Town Hall on 19 January 1976, in a speech titled "Britain Awake," Thatcher warned:
"The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen."
Five days later, the Soviet Ministry of Defence newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) dubbed her "The Iron Lady" in response — a Soviet insult she wore as a badge.
Lines to hold loosely
Some widely shared Thatcher lines — "in politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman," and the "TINA" shorthand line, "there really is no alternative" — appear on Wikiquote with a date and occasion attached, but without a primary transcript behind them found here. Treat them as attributed, not verbatim, until a primary source turns up.
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