"The supreme intellectual among the Tories was their supreme rebel: Enoch Powell. Powell was a true intellectual, more of an intellectual than any Labour politician: for he was a scholar. No other politician had the ability to translate the law book of a medieval Welsh king, edit Greek texts with a dryness that made Housman look gushing, master the intricacies of the medieval House of Lords, and reinterpret the New Testament... He was a formidable speaker, logical, precise, incandescent, as fluent as Benn but more ordered, more gifted in his use of metaphor and in the balance of his sentences... Our generation considered him the embodiment of all they feared... His curious classless voice, his staring eyes that might have been transplanted from Rasputin, his clear incisive sentences, made him a demonic figure for his contemporaries... Powell himself was content to await the verdict of history, certain that that verdict would prove him to be the most far-sighted man of his times."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomPolitical leadersPoets from EnglandPeople from BirminghamAnglicans from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Noel Annan, Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-War Britain (1991), pp. 552–554
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enoch_Powell
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Enoch Powell
politician, linguist, poet
1912 – 1998 · United Kingdom
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).
352 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Enoch Powell →
Related Quotes
"Some problems are unavoidable. Some evils can be coped with to a certain extent, but not prevented. But that a nation…"
"Once you go nuclear at all, you go nuclear for good; and you know it. Here is the parting of the ways, for from this …"
"I find in my constituency in the last few weeks an ominous deterioration, which is taking the form not of discriminat…"
"Often when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost for the gift …"
"He talks so fascinatingly on history, architecture and many subjects that politics seldom came up, but I should be di…"
"There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all th…"
"She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes t…"
"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood.""
"Integration of races of totally disparate origins and culture is one of the great myths of our time. It has never wor…"
"It is advertising that enthrones the customer as king. This infuriates the socialist...[it is] the crossing of the bo…"