Top 51 Quotes & Sayings by Enoch Powell

When I repress my emotion my stomach keeps score.

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

No battle is worth fighting except the last one.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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, of that which is prescriptive.

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.

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

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.

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.

The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

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.

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

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

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."

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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... [The EEC] is the most un-Tory thing that can be conceived.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I should like to have been killed in the war.

I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England [sic] 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.

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

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

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.

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