The lesson is clear. Inflation devalues us all.

Freedom based on respect for the individual, is an idea whose strength and beauty has remained undimmed down the ages. Other ideas and other words have been twisted and usurped. But freedom resists such treatment. It is the great gift of Western culture to mankind. It remains the driving force of the Western democracies today. It is the source of their strength, of their diversity and of their prosperity.

From time to time we have taken this prescription of sound money and good financial housekeeping. But we gave up because we didn't like the pain and discomfort that any medicine can cause when it starts to take effect. So we sought the easy option, but it always led to harder times—to worse inflation followed by more unemployment. Today we know that excess money creates the fever of inflation. Yet it is suggested that we are somehow jeopardising the future of industry by giving top priority to defeating inflation. I tell you that inflation is the biggest destroyer of all—of industry, of jobs, of savings, and of society. Surely, it is folly to diagnose the disease and to know the cure but to lack the courage to prescribe or the tenacity to take the medicine.

In the background lurks the scourge of international terrorism. There are people exercising power in a few countries and leading political factions in others who seem to be moved by narrow, brutal and irrational impulses. Their view of their own self-interest is so blinkered as to leave no space for purely human values, for peaceful negotiation or for economic advancement. They are bent on the destruction of the established order and of civilised ways of doing business. They must never be allowed to succeed.

In reflecting on liberty many think mainly in terms of political freedoms. These are founded in a rule of law which protects personal rights against the arbitrary actions of political authority. The right to elect legislators and holders of great executive offices is one of the pillars of our own freedom. But alone it is not enough to support a just and free society. The other great pillar is economic freedom.

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

MARGARET THATCHER, speech to the American Bar Association, July 15, 1985

They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations.

MARGARET THATCHER, interview, Woman's Own, October 31, 1987

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

MARGARET THATCHER, The Observer, April 4, 1989

Freedom is heady stuff and there are those who shy away from it and run for the seemingly safe haven of state provision, and government subsidy. The help which society gives to the needy can so easily sap their initiative; instead of aiding people in time of difficulty so that they can deal more effectively with life, we so often trap them into a continuing dependence, taking away all their ability to stand on their own feet. In a Conservative society we must strive to use the welfare state to help people to independence not condemn them to dependence. Our caring community must continue to help the needy and those for whom only the state can provide. But it can only do so if it is freed from the incubus of dependence which this fear of freedom creates. If we try to care for everyone then the needy will be the first to suffer. If instead we help men and women to regain their freedom, we shall be freed to reach out more generously to those whom society alone can help.