Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. - Margaret Thatcher

Perhaps [the] most important reason for the fall in standards and increase in crime—the attack on traditional values. It is not surprising that sometimes parents have been confused about the endless advice and the many rival theories on how to bring up children. There were times when I had to remind myself that our parents and grandparents brought us up without trendy theories and they didn't make such a bad job of it. So it would seem that the tried and trusted values and commonsense application would lead to far better results than we are now experiencing. We must teach that each of us is a responsible person who can choose his own course of action and who has a duty to others to do as he would be done by. That morality is largely based on religious values. Cut the stem and the plant withers. That is why we have been so keen to keep religious teaching in our schools. To those who say that is indoctrinating children, I would reply—it is no such thing. It is a practical recognition of the truth that while an adult may, if he wishes, reject the faith in which he has been brought up, a child will find it difficult to acquire any faith at all without some instruction in the discipline of belief and practice.

And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain – and Britain and Socialism are not the same thing...It's the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease – they’ve run out of other people's money.

I find that the conservatism which I follow does have some things in common with what Professor Hayek was preaching and also has some things in common with what you called old-fashioned Liberals. Let me just quote one, to whom I am devoted, John Stuart Mill on liberty. “A nation that dwarfs its citizens will find that with small men it can accomplish no great thing.” Is that not what I have been saying? Yes, it is partly perhaps old-fashioned liberalism...my pride that it has something in common with that...but that also has something in common with my belief that really nations are there to try to help people to bring out the best talents and abilities and initiatives in themselves and that, I think, is conserving the best in human nature and trying to change the rest, but trying to change it through the character of men and women.