Hilaire Belloc Quotes

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Catholic, Church, Divinity

  "The Life of Hilaire Belloc". Book by Robert Speaight, 1957.

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Christian, Believe, Civilization

  Hilaire Belloc (2017). “The Great Heresies”, p.95, Ignatius Press

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Laughter, Wine, Shining

  Hilaire Belloc, “The Catholic Sun”

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Catholic, Church, Remember

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• Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it. 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Support

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Religious, Common, Language

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Political, World

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.102, TAN Books

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Memories, Reality, Rocks

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Liberty, Libertarian, Wealth

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Steps

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Ridiculous, Politician, Acquaintance

  Hilaire Belloc (1970). “Complete verse [of] H. Belloc: including Sonnets and verse, Cautionary verses, The modern traveller, etc”

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• The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Men, Gentleman, Language

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• Slowly but certainly the proletarian, by every political reform which secures his well-being under new rules of insurance, of State control in education, of State medicine and the rest, is developing into the slave, leaving the rich man apart and free. All industrial civilization is clearly moving towards the re-establishment of the Servile State.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Moving, Men

  Hilaire Belloc (2009). “Essays of a Catholic”, p.167, TAN Books

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Men, Healthy, Conflict

  "The Silence of the Sea". Book by Hilaire Belloc, 1940.

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Assessment, Statistics, Judgment

  The Silence of the Sea On Statistics (p. 171)

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Church, Defeated

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• 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.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Suggestions, Population, Dull

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.35, IHS Press

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• I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Life, Travel, Journey

  Hilaire Belloc (1942). “Places”

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• Capitalism had arisen through the misuse and exaggeration of certain rights, notably the right of property - the basis of economic freedom - and the right of contract, which is one of the main functions of economic freedom. Therefore, even under Capitalism, so long as the old principles were remembered it was possible to recall the principles whereby Society had once been sane and well ordered.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Rights, Long, Politics

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• It was the Faith which gradually and indirectly transformed the slave into the serf, and the serf into the free peasant. . . . You will not be able to set up in a pagan or an heretical or a wholly indifferent society the institutions characteristic of economic freedom; you will not be able to curb competition which alone would be sufficient to destroy such freedom, nor pursue permanently and consecutively anyone part of the program. The thing must be done as a whole, and it can be done as a whole only by the ambient influence of Catholicism.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Competition, Would Be, Done

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• When the mass of men are dispossessed - own nothing - they become wholly dependent upon the owners; and when those owners are in active competition to lower the cost of production the mass of men whom they exploit not only lack the power to order their own lives, but suffer from want and insecurity as well.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Order

  Hilaire Belloc (2017). “The Great Heresies”, p.110, Ignatius Press

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• 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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Men, Advantage, Mankind

  Hilaire Belloc (2015). “Delphi Works of Hilaire Belloc (Illustrated)”, p.2675, Delphi Classics

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• Physicians of the utmost fame, Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their fees, 'There is no Cure for this Disease.'

  Hilaire Belloc

  Physicians, Disease, Fame

  Cautionary Tales (1907) "Henry King"

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• Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Science, Objectivity, Victory

  The Silence of the Sea On Statistics (p. 173)

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• And the men that were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Boys, Men, Drink

  Hilaire Belloc (1951). “Hilaire Belloc: an anthology of his prose and verse”

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