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.

72 Copy quote
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

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

Hilaire Belloc

Church, Defeated

43 Copy quote
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

39 Copy quote
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

39 Copy quote
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”

66 Copy quote
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

58 Copy quote
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”

26 Copy quote
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

Hilaire Belloc

Liberty, Libertarian, Wealth

61 Copy quote
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.

Hilaire Belloc

Taken, Men, Organization

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

Hilaire Belloc

Liberty, Comfort, Increase

19 Copy quote
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, Collective Memory

45 Copy quote
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

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

Hilaire Belloc

Funny, Death, Reading

"On His Books" l. 1 (1923)

57 Copy quote
It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man-a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom.

Hilaire Belloc

Men, Catholic, Mind

Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.47, TAN Books

13 Copy quote
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."

Hilaire Belloc

Wisdom, Fighting, Order

22 Copy quote
It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.

Hilaire Belloc

Song, Singing, Second Best

On Everything (1909) "On Song"

8 Copy quote
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.

Hilaire Belloc

Catholic, Thank God, Rosary

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

10 Copy quote
... But as a Godless greed pursued its career from excess to excess, it provoked a sort of twin hostile brother, equally Godless, born in the same atmosphere of utter disregard for the foundational virtues of humility and charity. This hostile twin brother of Capitalism was destined to be called Communism, and is today setting out to murder its elder.

Hilaire Belloc

Brother, Humility, Careers

20 Copy quote
Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.

Hilaire Belloc

Interesting, Boring, Made

Hilaire Belloc (1938). “Stories, essays, and poems”

21 Copy quote
Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, it distribution and exchange were regulated with a view to securing the Christian life of Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in others words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly, in the close connection between wealth and public function.

Hilaire Belloc

Christian, Philosophy, Men

16 Copy quote
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

36 Copy quote
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.

Hilaire Belloc

Elements, Disease, Finance

14 Copy quote
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

42 Copy quote
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 any one 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

"The Crisis Of Civilization".

35 Copy quote

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Born: July 27, 1870
Died: July 16, 1953
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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