ENOCH POWELL

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

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

When I repress my emotion my stomach keeps score.

To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.

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

No battle is worth fighting except the last one.

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

I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.

I do not know if the doctrine that the nation-state arose in the 19th century was still being taught:;... but it is erroneous. The nation-state reaches back far into the origins of Europe itself and perhaps beyond. If Europe was not always a Europe of nations, it was always a Europe in which nations existed, and were taken for granted, as a basic form of the State.

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

The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.

Yet we slink about like whipped curs:;... our self-abasement principally takes the form of subservience to the United States:;... we are under no necessity to participate in the American nightmare of a Soviet monster barely held at bay in all quarters of the globe by an inconceivable nuclear armament and by political intervention everywhere from Poland to Cambodia. It is the Americans who need us in order to act out their crazy scenario... We simply do not need to go chasing up and down after the vagaries of the next ignoramus to become President of the United States.

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

It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is.

I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination 'seeing', to quote a recent speech of the British Prime Minister, 'the rest of the world as its rightful fiefdom.' How any rational person, viewing objectively the history of the last thirty-five years, could entertain this 'international misunderstanding' challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension. The notion has no basis in fact... If Russia is bent on world conquest, she has been remarkably slothful and remarkably unsuccessful.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.