Wealth & Money Quote by Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher draws a bright moral line through an argument she wanted to win on economic grounds: profit isn’t the sin; motive is. The phrasing is surgical. “Creation of wealth” sounds industrious, almost civic-minded - a public good produced through effort and enterprise. Then she pivots to “love of money,” a deliberately intimate verb that recasts greed as a kind of emotional corruption. By adding “for its own sake,” she tightens the noose: the problem isn’t markets, it’s idolatry.

The intent is political as much as ethical. Thatcherism needed to legitimize deregulation, privatization, and an unapologetic embrace of capitalism in a country steeped in postwar welfare-state consensus. This line offers moral cover: you can cheer the banker and the shopkeeper alike, while still condemning the cartoon villain of avarice. It’s also a rebuttal to critics who heard her project as licensed selfishness. She’s insisting her revolution has a conscience - and that its enemies are unfairly equating wealth with vice.

The subtext, though, is sharper. By reducing the dispute to personal morality (“love”), she shifts attention away from structural outcomes: inequality, deindustrialization, the hollowing of unions, regional decline. If harm is caused, the implication runs, blame the individual’s character, not the system’s incentives. It’s a classic leader’s move: frame a contested economic order as a test of virtue. In Thatcher’s hands, capitalism isn’t merely efficient; it’s redeemable, provided you want money less than you want what money can prove about you.