Hilaire Belloc Quotes

The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine - but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.

The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.

When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated.

It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!

When one remembers how the Catholic Church has been governed, and by whom, one realizes that it must have been divinely inspired to have survived at all.

Here richly, with ridiculous display, The Politician's corpse was laid away. While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

The propaganda of Communism throughout the world, in organization and direction is in the hands of Jewish agents. As for anyone who does not know that the Bolshevist movement in Russia is Jewish, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppression of our deplorable press.

Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty.

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance... here is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease.

Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.

Before the curse of statistics fell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life, full of merriment and go and informed by fairly good judgment.

All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.

We may not say to the poor: "You have a right to fight the rich merely because they are rich and in order to make yourselves less poor." We may say: "You have a right to fight to prevent the conditions of your life becoming inhuman," but we may not say, "You have a right to fight merely because you desire to have more and your opponent to have less."

I always like to associate with a lot of priests because it makes me understand anti-clerical things so well.

If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.

These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind

Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.