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Enoch Powell
283 quotes
“The world has recently been treated for nearly a decade to the unusual spectacle of a great empire deliberately taking every possible step to secure its own destruction, because its citizens were so obsessed by prejudice, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as never to perform the few logical steps necessary for proving that they would shortly be involved in a guerre à outrance, which could be neither averted nor escaped.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Powell's inaugural lecture as Professor of Greek (7 May 1938), quoted in Greek in the University. An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 9
“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 (1912–1998) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his parents (18 September 1938) after Neville Chamberlain's meeting with Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 47
“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 (1912–1998) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his parents (27 June 1939), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 53
“The thought struck me for the first time today that our duty to our country may not terminate with the peace – apart, I mean, from the duty of begetting children to bear arms for the King in the next generation. To be more explicit, I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were; and if the present hostilities do not actually merge into a war with our terrible enemy, America, it will remain for those of us who have the necessary knowledge and insight to do what we can where we can to help Britain be victorious again in her next crisis.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his parents (16 February 1943), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 75
“You have never expressed any decided political opinions, and indeed I do not know if or how far you assent to the proposition that almost unlimited sacrifices of individual life and happiness are worth while to preserve the unique structure of power of which the keystone (the only conceivable and indispensable keystone) is the English Crown. I for my part find it the nearest thing in the world to an absolute (as opposed to a relative) value: it is like the outer circle that bound my universe, so that I cannot conceive anything beyond it.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his parents (9 March 1943), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 75
“There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside—the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the annual conference of the National Association of Mental Health in London (9 March 1961), quoted in The Times (10 March 1961), p. 8
“If the activities of the health services are thus neither justifiable by economic calculation, nor assessable in comparative statistical terms, these are characteristics which they share with all the highest activities of man.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lloyd Roberts Lecture ("Health and Wealth") to the Royal Society of Medicine (19 October 1961), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 55
“In my early twenties I read all Nietzsche—not just the main works but the minor works as well, all of them, and every scrap of published correspondence. Nietzsche alone of men out of books has a share in the loyalty and affectionate gratitude which otherwise belongs only to living teachers.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Thin But Thorough', The Times (27 September 1962), p. 15
“I consider there is no surer touchstone of the civilisation of a community than the manner in which it cares for its mentally afflicted members; and among that group those whose mental affliction is of a kind which peculiarly excites fear and aversion are the most acid test of all. It is incumbent on the Minister of Health to see to it that this country has no reason to be ashamed of its performance in that test.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Broadmoor Hospital (27 June 1963), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 48
“All men", said Aristotle, "by nature desire to know." The pursuit of truth, the effort to comprehend, arrange, interpret some aspect or other of the universe we perceive, is an activity of humanity which justifies, rewards and motivates itself. The study of something for its own sake, for the sake of knowing, understanding, grasping it and for nothing else, is an essential characteristic of education, lower or higher, though more obviously of higher education. The content of education must therefore be that which men would wish to know for its own sake.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Working Men's College, St. Pancras (14 December 1963), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 39
“It is no accident that the Labour Party of 1964 should share this craving for autarchy, for economic self-sufficiency, with the pre-war Fascist régimes and the present-day Communist states. They are all at heart totalitarian.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Dulwich Conservative Association (29 February 1964), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 75
“The creative forces in a nation lie in the people themselves—in their determination, their effort, their hopefulness, their thrift, their readiness to venture and to change. Only in proportion as they show and apply those qualities can the economy advance. The truly creative policies are the policies which enable the nation to put forth the effort and to take the decisions upon which, alone, the rate of its advance depends.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (15 April 1964), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 23
“When a man offers to sell you something at less than its market price, it is a pretty good sign that you are about to be swindled.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Aldridge (2 October 1964), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 64
“In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Article for The Sunday Telegraph, citing the swing to the Conservatives in his constituency and others with large working-class electorates (18 October 1964), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Po…
“Immigration was, and is, an issue. In my constituency it has for years been question number one, into which discussion of every other political topic—housing, health, benefits, employment—promptly turned.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Tories in the Wilderness', The Sunday Telegraph (18 October 1964), quoted in Paul Corthorn, Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain (2019), p. 79
“Before more months or years are spent by Ministers, by economic staffs, by industrialists and by trade unionists, in a pursuit which is as foredoomed to futility as filling a sieve or making a rope of sand, it is time to call a halt, and to declare in round and unmistakeable terms that an incomes policy, in any relevant or useful sense, does not and cannot exist—except perhaps in a communist dictatorship.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Birmingham (28 November 1964), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 100
“So let us make this our resolve: we will not be tempted, or frightened, or cajoled into turning aside from our plain duty and common-sense necessity: so to control and limit and guide our public expenditure that it no longer entails upon this country the recurrent menace of inflationary crises or the more insidious but in the long run dangerous atrophy of an increasingly state-dominated economy.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Westbury-on-Trim (26 February 1965), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 118
“The effect of any combination to fix the price of labour in a particular employment by restraining those who would be prepared to pay more or accept less—that is what collective bargaining means if it means anything at all—is the same as the effect of any other restrictive practice: it makes everybody worse off in the end.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Beaconsfield (19 March 1965), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), p. 131
“Under the Labour Government in the last eighteen months Britain has behaved, perfectly clearly and perfectly recognizably, as an American satellite.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Falkirk (26 March 1966) during the general election campaign, quoted in Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970), p. 337
“The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Observer (24 April 1966)
“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 (1912–1998) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attacking the Labour President of the Board of Trade, Douglas Jay, who wanted to standardise packaging for detergents. (The Daily Telegraph 29 April 1967); quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powel…
“I find in my constituency in the last few weeks an ominous deterioration, which is taking the form not of discrimination by white against coloured but of insolence of coloured towards white and corresponding fearfulness on the part of white. It is this which will be exacerbated by the projected legislation on discrimination and which we shall have to take into account in making up our minds on our attitude.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Edward Heath (7 August 1967), quoted in Paul Corthorn, Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain (2019), p. 81
“Integration of races of totally disparate origins and culture is one of the great myths of our time. It has never worked throughout history. The United States lost its only real opportunity of solving its racial problem when it failed after the Civil War to partition the old Confederacy into a "South Africa" and a "Liberia".”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remark to an American visitor shortly after Powell's return to London from his first visit to the United States in October 1967, as quoted in Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970), p. 341
“Often when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost for the gift of capitalism.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to a luncheon of lobby correspondents (c. early 1968), quoted in T. E. Utley, Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking (1968), p. 114
“Some problems are unavoidable. Some evils can be coped with to a certain extent, but not prevented. But that a nation should have saddled itself, without necessity and without countervailing benefit, with a wholly avoidable problem of immense dimensions is enough to make one weep. That the same nation should stubbornly persist in allowing the problem, great as it already is, to be magnified further, is enough to drive one to despair.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Walsall (9 February 1968), quoted in Still to Decide (1972), p. 290
“What I would take 'racialist' to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief. So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is 'no'—unless, perhaps, it is to be a racialist in reverse. I regard many of the peoples in India as being superior in many respects—intellectually, for example, and in other respects—to Europeans. Perhaps that is over-correcting.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with the Birmingham Post (4 May 1968), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), pp. 466-467
“Too often today people are ready to tell us: "This is not possible, that is not possible." I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool (10 October 1968), quoted in The Times (11 October 1968), p. 4
“I hope those who shouted "Fascist" and "Nazi" are aware that before they were born I was fighting against Fascism and Nazism.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to student hecklers at a speech in Cardiff (8 November 1968), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 489
“Enoch Powell: Now, we were invaded by the Danes, they did alter the country and we fought them for two hundred years. If that's what is meant – to be allowed to happen? Marghanita Laski: Were we wise to do so? Didn't they add to us in the end? Wasn't there much more suffering and misery because we fought them? Enoch Powell: Only because we fought them, and eventually subjugated them and Christianised them. (applause)”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Any Questions?, BBC Radio (29 November 1968), quoted in Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (1991), p. 396
“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 (1912–1998) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Answer to David Frost, who asked him if he was a racialist (3 January 1969), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 504
“I could not vote for any legislation which would legalise a constitution for Southern Rhodesia under which there would not be evident and relatively early advance to majority rule.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (16 October 1969)
“The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this country in fifteen or twenty years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. 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 (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. 'Racialist,' they chant.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A quotation from a letter Powell said had been sent to him from Northumberland, referring to one of his constituents. (According to a BBC radio programme broadcast in January 2007, the person in question was Druscilla C…
“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 (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that I will say is that in 1939 I voluntarily returned from Australia to this country to serve as a private soldier in the war against Germany and Nazism. I am the same man today... It does not follow that because a person resident in this country is not English that he does not enjoy equal treatment before the law and public authorities. I set my face like flint against discrimination.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reaction to Tony Benn's speech that "the flag hoisted at Wolverhampton [Powell's constituency] is beginning to look like the one that fluttered over Dachau and Belsen" (3 June 1970), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Rom…
“Some of us personally witnessed what was done on the continent under that sign and it is a symbol we shall never forget.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reaction to a youth who had given the Hitler salute during his speech in Wolverhampton (6 June 1970), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 558
“It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian (6 June 1970)
“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 (1912–1998) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Tamworth (15 June 1970), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998), p. 563
“This is the positive aspect of British opposition to entry into the Community – the breadth and depth of the people's conviction that in no foreseeable future could they in this sense form one electorate with the inhabitants of the continent... It is that in their thousand-year history the British Isles has made a nation which recognizes itself more in its separation and difference from the continent than its similarity and kinship.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Turin (4 May 1971), quoted in The Common Market: The Case Against (1971), pp. 95–96
“I do not believe that this nation, which has maintained and defended its independence for a thousand years, will now submit to see it merged or lost; nor did I become a member of our sovereign Parliament in order to consent to that sovereignty being abated or transferred. Come what may, I cannot and will not.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton (13 October 1971), quoted in The Times (14 October 1971), p. 4
“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 (1912–1998) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Southall Chamber of Commerce, Centre Airport Hotel, Middlesex (4 November 1971), quoted in Still to Decide (1972), p. 209
“[T]he only realignment of currencies which can be lasting and satisfactory is one which is continuously worked out by a free market.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (23 November 1971)
“The monetary belief, or the monetary myth, upon which a whole generation has been reared—that an injection of money into the system is the automatic cure for unemployment—has collapsed in the face of the experience of the past four or five years.”
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the House of Commons (23 November 1971)