Interview with Woman's Own magazine in 1987 Quotes
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Source: Interview with Woman's Own magazine in 1987
Speaker: Margaret Thatcher
"There is no such thing [as society]!"
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Context
This line was spoken by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in an interview with Woman's Own magazine in 1987.
Woman's Own magazine, a magazine women can call their own, interviewed Meryl Streep—er, Margaret Thatcher—after she won her third term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
When asked about education and the economy and society's duty to its people, Thatcher responded with a long response that, even in 1987, needed to be reduced to just a soundbite. The soundbite that stuck was "There is no such thing [as society]!" which led some to cast her as "an anti-social radical."
Where you've heard it
Both when Meryl Streep donned Thatcher's teeth for The Iron Lady in 2011 and when Thatcher herself died in April 2013, her legacy was examined at length, and this is one of her most famous quotes.
Additional Notable References:
- An album of punk music took this quote as its title.
- A history (or should we say an history) of Britain in the 1980s also uses this line as its title.
Pretentious Factor
If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10.
Depending on which side of politics you're on, you either abhor this quote (she's ostracizing community) or think you understand the true meaning (we all need to take care of ourselves)—so we're just going to split it down the middle.