Enoch Powell famous quotes

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

#Evil #Function #Statesmanship

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

#Silence #Silence Is

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

#Travel #Mean #Journey

Yet we slink about like whipped curs:;... our self-abasement principally takes the form of subservience to the United States:;... we are under no necessity to participate in the American nightmare of a Soviet monster barely held at bay in all quarters of the globe by an inconceivable nuclear armament and by political intervention everywhere from Poland to Cambodia. It is the Americans who need us in order to act out their crazy scenario... We simply do not need to go chasing up and down after the vagaries of the next ignoramus to become President of the United States.
-- Enoch Powell

#Crazy #Order #Self

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

#Mad #Funeral #Growth

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

#Believe #Mean #Men

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

#Cutting #Political #Affair

It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.
-- Enoch Powell

#Funeral #Insane #Purpose

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

#Betrayal #Depth #Exhibitions

The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
-- Enoch Powell

#Business #Enemy #Advertising

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

#Emotion #Stomach #Score

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

#Clever #People #Important

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

#Fighting #Nazism #Born

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

#Book #Hours #Glorious

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

#Government #Coward #Blind

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

#War

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

#Men #Imagination

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

#Giving #Tunes #Politics

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

#Party #Irony #Stranger

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

#Littles #Sometimes #Nonsense

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

#Sacrifice #Self #Political

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

#Believe #Heart #World

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

#Responsibility #Ethics #Action

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

#Humble #Media #Sea

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

#Fighting #Battle #Lasts

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

#Space #Transcendental #Realms

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

#Military #Drawing #Europe

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

#Kings #Choices #Berlin

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood.
-- Enoch Powell

#Blood #Rivers #Looks

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

#War #Should

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

#Russia #Years #Challenges

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

#Queens #Men #Justice

I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.
-- Enoch Powell

#Writing #Diaries

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

#Taken #Europe #Taught

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

#Eye #Race #Land

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

#Mean #Government #Would Be

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

#Race

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

#Media #Sea #Complaining