Enoch Powell Quotes

#1. But they also awarded a quite respectable 55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.

Marc Morris

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that.

Enoch Powell

#5. It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is.

Enoch Powell

#6. 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

#7. A politician complaining about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea.

Enoch Powell

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

Enoch Powell

#9. 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

#10. If I cannot understand my friend's silence, I will never get to understand his words.

Enoch Powell

#11. I am the last person whom it would be reasonable to expect to leave the Conservative Party.

Enoch Powell

#12. The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.

Enoch Powell

#13. The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.

Enoch Powell

#14. 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

#15. Politicians who complain about the media are like sailors who complain about the sea.

Enoch Powell

#16. You have to give the electorate a tune they can whistle.

Enoch Powell

#17. The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

Enoch Powell

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Enoch Powell

#21. Of all political sacred-cows, education is the most sacred and the most cow-like.

Enoch Powell

#22. To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.

Enoch Powell

#23. People are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles.

Enoch Powell

#24. No battle is worth fighting except the last one.

Enoch Powell

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

Enoch Powell

#26. History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

Enoch Powell

#27. 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

#28. When I repress my emotion my stomach keeps score.

Enoch Powell

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions.

Enoch Powell

#32. History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.

Enoch Powell

#33. I should like to have been killed in the war.

Enoch Powell

#34. 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

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

Enoch Powell

#36. '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

#37. 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