Margaret Thatcher

“I was impressed by the writing of the American theologian and social scientist Michael Novak, who put into new and striking language what I had always believed about individuals and communities. Mr. Novak stressed the fact that what he called ‘democratic captialism’ was a moral and social, not just an economic system, that it encouraged a range of virtues and that it depended upon co-operation not just ‘going it alone.’ These were important insights which, along with our thinking about the effects of the dependency culture, provided the intellectual basis for my approach to those great questions brought together in political parlance as ‘the quality of life’”

from Margaret Thatcher: the Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollings, 1993), 627.