Enoch Powell Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

'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.

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

The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

No battle is worth fighting except the last one.

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

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 keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.

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

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

When I repress my emotion my stomach keeps score.

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.