Buses and Margaret Thatcher

As someone very interested in the stigmas around public transit, I was delighted a number of years ago to come across this quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

It turns out that the back story about this utterance is not as straightforward as it seems. David McKie from the Guardian did some digging around to get to the bottom of things:

I have quite often read that Margaret Thatcher declared that any man seen riding on a bus after the age of 30 should consider himself a failure. That most of those who have quoted this merciless sentiment have done so without checking their source is clear from the number of variants, with the qualifying age for establishing that you're one of life's losers being variously quoted as 30, 29 or even 26. Having spent much of a day trying to discover where and when she said it, I began to suspect that it might be apocryphal too.

He points out that other famous quotes have similarly questionable origins and they're difficult to validate once they're embedded in the cultural lore. The Thatcher bus quote even has its own section in Wikiquotes.

(via The Guardian)