Enoch Powell Quotes

The few Roman Catholics who serve in the [Ulster Defence] regiment today are very brave men indeed. They do so at the risk of their lives in a way that their colleagues do not. I am proud to have some of those men in my constituency and to know them personally.

He says to the Sovereign: "I no longer am leader of the majority party in the House of Commons; but I am carrying on as your Prime Minister." Now I don't think anyone can say that—at least without inflicting damage on the constitution... [it is] tantamount to treating the monarch herself with disrespect and denying the very principle on which our parliamentary democracy is founded.

There is no doubt that the contrast is patent between what we call, with too gross a classification, the developed and the undeveloped countries... Why is there this difference, this divergence, this bifurcation? ... [I]t is not due to any difference in intellectual capacity, human ability or insight. It is an absurd notion that the European is intellectually superior to vast millions of the human race in Asia and elsewhere. The subtlety, the insight, the power of reflection and of argument to be found in India and elsewhere are equal to anything which is within our conception or grasp. As for character and human ability, it would be ludicrous, and a confession of total and boorish ignorance, to say that it is difference in those respects which accounts for these differences of experience. In case I be misunderstood, may I say at once that I do not believe that the IQ method of analysing the human race produces useful results for this purpose. I doubt whether many of the characteristics which we regard as typically and transcendentally European are purely intellectual. I think they have in them very much of the moral and very much of the social.

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.

[The House of Lords] is an integral part of Parliament simply because that is how Parliament evolved, and its powers, like those of the House of Commons, derive not from a theory but from precedent.

It is one of the handicaps arising from our insularity and a peculiar side effect of our self-conceit that we are simply incapable of comprehending the depth and durability of the resentment which is held against us by the Germans and the French, by the Germans for the obvious reason that we defeated them; by the French for the less obvious but still more potent reason that we did not share in their defeat... Nobody is more Francophile than I am. But we understand nothing if we do not understand the axiomatic nature of the laws of attraction and repulsion between an off-shore island nation and the political system of the adjacent continent... Politics is the continuation of war by other means... It is a little reminder that for the principal continental nations, notably Germany and France, the European Economic Community is indeed "the continuation of war by other means".

Having risen at my customary hour of seven, going down, tiptoeing down, and seeing the paper slanting through the letterbox, and reading the words “Heath's Gamble...” Heath's Gamble? I thought. Gamble? So I pulled it through and it fell out flat on the mat: “Heath's Gamble Fails”. So I took it up with me to the bathroom and sang the Te Deum.

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.

It is an old delusion to suppose that those bent on violence and anarchy can be satisfied with instalments of what is miscalled reform. If reform were the object, they could be: but the object is not reform, the object is destruction. When a concession has been extorted here, it will be followed by another demand there; when one humiliation has been inflicted on the authorities, the means will instantly be sought of inflicting another. There is no quantity of danegeld which buys off anarchy; there is no end to the instalments which will be swallowed and leave the aggressor unsatisfied. Sooner or later, therefore, and sooner better than later, there has to be a halt; and the Conservative party has a peculiar responsibility in this...as the Party which claims a special identification with law and order. So far our record has been unimpressive. We have been content to stand on the touchline and watch the university authorities, in their pitiful inexperience and gaucherie, go down to one defeat after another without so much as a word from us. Worse, we have often played the anarchists' game ourselves by joining in approval of the anarchists' demands. The time is overdue to stand and be heard out loud. We shall not want for echo from the people, who wonder that those who should speak for them have been silent so long.

All belief in democracy, above all in parliamentary democracy, is an act of faith, as the maintenance of all free institutions is an act of faith. It depends on the faith that the political will of the people is capable of self-expression and of impressing itself upon those free institutions and ultimately moulding them to its will. If that be not so, then democracy and Parliament and all their theory are empty husks. So it is a question of faith whether the people will defend, are determined to defend, have the desire and purpose to defend, or, if it is lost, to restore and regain, the supremacy of Parliament and the political independence of this country.

The Government know perfectly well that, in order to cope with the rising inflation and disastrous trade balance, it is indispensable to budget for a severe increase in taxation and a further reduction in the rate of growth of public expenditure. They have the majority and the authority to do this now. They do not need an election in order to act in the national interest. Nor do they need an election to get the country back to full-time work. Neither the miners nor the other trade unions have broken the law or threatened to break it. There is nothing sacrosanct about stage 3 or the Government's interpretations of it. A settlement will have to be found in the mining industry – and in every other industry – which will get the necessary labour into the necessary jobs.

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

Mother, with longing ever new
And joy too great for telling,
I turn again to rest in you
My earliest dwelling.

Perhaps the most insidious danger today is the notion, which many accept unreflectingly and others propagate sedulously, that a stable value of money is incompatible with economic progress or with a high level of employment. Theory and experience alike refute such a notion. I have already reminded you that throughout sixty years of Britain's golden age of expansion in every sphere, the value of money remained virtually constant. So far from it being true that inflation and a high level of employment hang together, the fact is that, for a nation in Britain's situation, dependent on world trade and commercial dealings with other countries for its livelihood, continued inflation is the greatest threat to full employment. It would be a tragedy if the Government or the nation allowed themselves to be diverted by these false fears from the single-minded pursuit of plain and elementary duty: the duty to secure and preserve the integrity and stability of the medium of exchange, on which depend all the economic dealings of man with man.

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.