Enoch Powell > Quotes

“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.”
― Enoch Powell

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

“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

“History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.”
― Enoch Powell

“The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
― Enoch Powell, Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" Speech 1968

“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

“People are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles.”
― Enoch Powell, Reflections of a statesman: The writings and speeches of Enoch Powell

“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.”
― Enoch Powell

“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

“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.”
― Enoch Powell

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

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

“Eventually, reality breaks through.”
― Enoch Powell

“Eventually reality breaks through.”
― Enoch Powell