Enoch Powell Quotes

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

Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.

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

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

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

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.

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

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".

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.

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.

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.

You fooled us. Render your work, not your lives. This seems like the newest answer to an old question. Cheap muscle and blood to build you an Empire- that we can't stay in. Gran's gone missing from Saturday morning. Brixton Market? No one is frowning at the quality of the yams, or asking how the snapper's eye so cloudy. There'll be no Saturday soup tonight.

History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen,” said British politician Enoch Powell.

We must be mad, literally mad as a nation… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre… 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, 1968

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

Sloan’s document

He broke with Tony Benn, though, over the ‘black flag of Dachau’ speech in the 1970 election.† Oh, yes, but then he came to Enoch’s funeral, do you remember?

In John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid, the Sybil speaks of a “field of blood” and a “purple flood”. That there can be various translations should have made it evident to the political classes that Powell was not being literalist, though I have now stressed that enough. Instead, to read the entire segment it is clear the Sybil is warning of great hardship for Aeneas, the immigrant, but tells him in that in the end he shall get what he wishes: a  town of his own in the land to which he “migrated”. Powell will have been aware of this. That rather than integration, what Britain would end up with is foreign areas in Britain.

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