Enoch Powell Quotes & Sayings

It is advertising that enthrones the customer as king. This infuriates the socialist ... [it is] the crossing of the boundary between West Berlin and East Berlin. It is Checkpoint Charlie, or rather Checkpoint Douglas, the transition from the world of choice and freedom to the world of drab, standard uniformity. — Enoch Powell

It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors. — Enoch Powell

Politicians who complain about the media are like sailors who complain about the sea. — Enoch Powell

I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable. — Enoch Powell

As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people the underlying value of that which is traditional, that which is prescriptive. — Enoch Powell

It depends on how you define the word "racialist." If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatically "No. — Enoch Powell

I am the last person whom it would be reasonable to expect to leave the Conservative Party. — Enoch Powell

People are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles. — Enoch Powell

I should like to have been killed in the war. — Enoch Powell

History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen. — Enoch Powell

It is no accident that wherever the State ha taken economic decision away from the citizen, it has deprived him of his other liberties as well. — Enoch Powell

Of course I am very proud of being a Tory. Yes, in my head and in my heart I regard myself as a Tory. As I have said, I was born that way; I believe it is congenital. I am unable to change it. That is how I see the world ... is the most un-Tory thing that can be conceived. — Enoch Powell

I have set and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on the grounds of his origin. — Enoch Powell

When we look at the astonishing material achievements of the West. we see these things as the result, not of compulsion or government action or the superior wisdom of a few, but of that system of competition and free enterprise, rewarding success and penalising failure, which enables every individual to participate by his private decisions in shaping the future of his society. — Enoch Powell

The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books. — Enoch Powell

Independence, the freedom of a self-governing nation, is in my estimation the highest political good, for which any disadvantage, if need be, and any sacrifice are a cheap price. — Enoch Powell

Of all political sacred-cows, education is the most sacred and the most cow-like. — Enoch Powell

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. — Enoch Powell

It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at. — Enoch Powell

Lift the curtain and 'the State' reveals itself as a little group of fallible men in Whitehall, making guesses about the future, influenced by political prejudices and partisan prejudices, and working on projections drawn from the past by a staff of economists. — Enoch Powell

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs. — Enoch Powell

Paisley has been and remains a greater threat to the Union than the Foreign Office and the Provisional IRA rolled into one. — Enoch Powell

When I repress my emotion my stomach keeps score. — Enoch Powell

Virtually the entire inflow was therefore Asiatic, and all but three or four thousand of that inflow originated from the Indian subcontinent ... It is by 'black Power' that the headlines are caught, and under the shape of the negro that the consequences for Britain of immigration and what is miscalled 'race' are popularly depicted. Yet it is more truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who will dispute with him the possession of his native land. — Enoch Powell

I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination 'seeing', to quote a recent speech of the British Prime Minister, 'the rest of the world as its rightful fiefdom.' How any rational person, viewing objectively the history of the last thirty-five years, could entertain this 'international misunderstanding' challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension. The notion has no basis in fact ... If Russia is bent on world conquest, she has been remarkably slothful and remarkably unsuccessful. — Enoch Powell

No battle is worth fighting except the last one. — Enoch Powell

If in the words which the Secretary of State has just used, the use of a nuclear weapon is to be avoided 'at all costs'. what is the point of having one? — Enoch Powell

In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that. — Enoch Powell

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.
Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.
But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one. — Enoch Powell

Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned. — Enoch Powell

I hope those who shouted "Fascist" and "Nazi" are aware that before they were born I was fighting against Fascism and Nazism. — Enoch Powell

To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit. — Enoch Powell

I would sooner receive injustice in the Queen's courts than justice in a foreign court. I hold that man or woman to be a scoundrel who goes abroad to a foreign court to have the judgments of the Queen's courts overturned, the actions of her Government countermanded or the legislation of Parliament struck down. — Enoch Powell

The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination. — Enoch Powell

I do not know if the doctrine that the nation-state arose in the 19th century was still being taught:; ... but it is erroneous. The nation-state reaches back far into the origins of Europe itself and perhaps beyond. If Europe was not always a Europe of nations, it was always a Europe in which nations existed, and were taken for granted, as a basic form of the State. — Enoch Powell

The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a sobriquet as the 'Iron Lady'. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the Right Honourable Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Honourable Lady herself, will learn of what metal she is made. — Enoch Powell

History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen. — Enoch Powell

You have to give the electorate a tune they can whistle. — Enoch Powell

If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends. — Enoch Powell

Values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed. — Enoch Powell

A politician complaining about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea. — Enoch Powell

It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is. — Enoch Powell

A little nonsense now and then is not a bad thing - where would we politicians be if we were not allowed to talk it sometimes. — Enoch Powell

If I cannot understand my friend's silence, I will never get to understand his words. — Enoch Powell

A single currency means a single government, and that single government would be the government whose policies determined every aspect of economic life. — Enoch Powell

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. — Enoch Powell

I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions. — Enoch Powell

'Helping industry' is the elephant pit of socialism, a deep hole with sharp spikes at the bottom, covered over with twigs and fresh grass. — Enoch Powell