Quotes to inspire and reflect

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

A man you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

Books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

There could I marvel

I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven.

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.

Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a prime mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

Tantum ergo sacramentum

It’s a funny old world.

No! No! No!

I am naturally very sorry to see you go, but understand … your wish to be able to spend more time with your family.

There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

We have become a grandmother.

We can do business together.

We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am.

Now it must be business as usual.

It is exciting to have a real crisis on your hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment.

Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our armed forces and the Marines. Rejoice!

No one would remember the Good

To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only this to say. ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’

In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.

I stand before you tonight in my red chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved … the Iron Lady of the Western World! Me? A cold war warrior? Well, yes—if that is how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.

No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary—not the top jobs. Anyway I wouldn’t want to be Prime Minister. You have to give yourself 100%.

The important thing is not to think much but to love much.

Our goodness derives not from our capacity to think but to love.

Let nothing trouble you, nothing frighten you. All things are passing; God never changes. Patient endurance attains all things. Whoever possesses God lacks nothing: God alone suffices.

Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.

That, Sire, is a question of dates.

This is the beginning of the end.

Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle.

A stick and a string, with a fly at one end and a fool at the other.

Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit.

I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.

Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book.

So, naturalists observe, a flea

So geographers, in Afric-maps,

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

Then, rising with Aurora’s light,