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Enoch Powell Quotes

1912–1998 England

John Enoch Powell (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).

England
Poets

Random Enoch Powell quote

63 quotes

I was born ambitious, I suppose I shall die ambitious. I can no more change it than the colour of my eyes.

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

Oh, sweet it is, where grass is deep
And swifts are overhead,
To lie and watch the clouds, and weep
For friends already dead.

Collected Poems (1990)

She has peaked. I have the feeling of 1945. Mrs Thatcher has never known losing office as Gladstone did and the need to face changing circumstances and clear new obstacles before returning to power.

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

The 'Rivers of Blood' speech (1968)

"Because it has come to be so" is the only, but to him sufficient, answer which the Englishman gives for his institutions and the authority which is immanent in them.

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.

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

Now I alone sit by the fire,
And one remains of three;
For two have got their heart's desire
And left their grief to me.

Collected Poems (1990)

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.

Under the Labour Government in the last eighteen months Britain has behaved, perfectly clearly and perfectly recognizably, as an American satellite.

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.

[T]he only realignment of currencies which can be lasting and satisfactory is one which is continuously worked out by a free market.

I hate the ugly, hate the old,
I hate the lame and weak,
But more than all I hate the dead
That lie so still in their earthen bed
And never dare to rise.

Collected Poems (1990)

A pity she did not understand them!

The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not to account for what is, and what is accepted.

I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me...it is something I cannot alter.

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.

England alone found the way to transmute its feudal assembly into a matchless instrument of free government, which the rest of the world vainly aspire to imitate.

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Enoch Powell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.