Hilaire Belloc Quotes & Sayings

It seems to be saying perpetually; 'I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.' ... It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul. — Hilaire Belloc

The power of the State must be invoked for restoring economic freedom just as it has been invoked for destroying economic freedom. — Hilaire Belloc

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing — Hilaire Belloc

When they married and gave in marriage
They danced at the County Ball
And some of them kept a carriage
And the flood destroyed them all. — Hilaire Belloc

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

[Heresy is] the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. — Hilaire Belloc

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

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right. — Hilaire Belloc

The society of Christendom and especially of Western Christendom up to the explosion, which we call the Reformation, had been a society of owners: a Proprietarial Society. It was one in which there remained strong bonds between one class and another, and in which there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior, but not, in the main, a distinction between a restricted body of possessors and a main body of destitute at the mercy of the possessors, such as our society has become. — Hilaire Belloc

Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. — Hilaire Belloc

I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but money gives me pleasure all the time. — Hilaire Belloc

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

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

Remote and ineffectual don. — Hilaire Belloc

If any man gives you a wine you can't bear, don't say it is beastly ... But don't say you like it. You are endangering your soul and the use of wine as well ... Seek out some other wine good to your taste. — Hilaire Belloc

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...

Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey. — Hilaire Belloc

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

It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation. — Hilaire Belloc

I said to Heart, "How goes it?" Heart replied: "Right as a Ribstone Pippin!" But it lied. — Hilaire Belloc

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

An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight. — Hilaire Belloc

There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean. — Hilaire Belloc

Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent. — Hilaire Belloc

The very large units of production and exchange have access to credit on a large scale, sometimes without any cover at all, merely upon the prospect of their success, and always upon terms far easier than are open to their smaller rivals. It is perhaps on this line of easier credit that large capital today does most harm to small capital, drives it out and ruins it. — Hilaire Belloc

When people call this beast to mind, They marvel more and more At such a little tail behind, So large a trunk before. — Hilaire Belloc

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

The prospect of refreshment at the charges of another is an opportunity never to be neglected by men of clear commercial judgment. — Hilaire Belloc

I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing. — Hilaire Belloc

Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea, Are all human frame requires. — Hilaire Belloc

Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? — Hilaire Belloc

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

... that exasperating quality for which we have no name, which certainly is not accuracy, and which is quite the opposite of judgement, yet which catches the mind as brambles do our clothes. — Hilaire Belloc

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

But if I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the faith is at hand I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall once more be at work it will be morning. — Hilaire Belloc

The grace of God is courtesy. — Hilaire Belloc

Such are the mass of the supporters of either party. They derive their political opinions originally from some family tradition or some fanciful preference, but they back them with all the passion of sportsmen. In a vague subconscious way they know it is a game, but they happen to enjoy playing the game. — Hilaire Belloc

Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night; it is already morning. — Hilaire Belloc

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

[A]lways keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse — Hilaire Belloc

But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick, and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company; I shall, therefore, beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."
This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance. — Hilaire Belloc

Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community. — Hilaire Belloc

Of old when folk lay sick and sorely tried The doctors gave them physic, and they died. But here's a happier age: for now we know Both how to make men sick and keep them so. — Hilaire Belloc

The essential of the guild-idea is that [of] men pursuing the same form of activity, but only in cooperation limited to the end of preserving the economic freedom-that is the property and livelihood-of each member of the guild. — Hilaire Belloc

The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue. — Hilaire Belloc

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

The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions. — Hilaire Belloc

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

In the same way the eminence attaching to the mere possession of great wealth disappoints us nine times out of ten, especially if the wealth has been accumulated rapidly. For great wealth is accumulated rapidly by cunning or chance, or a mixture of the two. Cunning has nothing to do with high qualities; it is rather a presumption against them; while chance has nothing to do with them either. Therefore it is that men are always complaining after meeting So-and-so, that he seemed to be astonishingly stupid, though he made a million in ten years and started as a pauper. — Hilaire Belloc

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

I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use the leaden one his hide is sure to flatten em. — Hilaire Belloc

There is always something more to be said, and it is always so difficult to turn up the splice neatly at the edges. — Hilaire Belloc

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

The sea drives truth into a man like salt. — Hilaire Belloc

For every time she shouted "Fire!" They only answered "Little liar!" And therefore when her aunt returned, Matilda, and the house, were burned. — Hilaire Belloc

There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same. — Hilaire Belloc

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

I am a sundial, and I make a botch
Of what is done much better by a watch. — Hilaire Belloc

Belloc led the charge in his critique of this misguided sense of superiority and myopic view of progress. But it was he alone among historians, social commentators, and counter-cultural voices who predicted that Islam - or as he called it, "Mohammedanism" - would rise again and, as it had in the past, harness the technology of the West as a weapon to turn back on the West and crush it by degrees. After September 11, 2001, no one is surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West's superiority back on itself; what is surprising is that a lone historian and essayist saw this coming in the 1930s. That he captivates and places the reader in the middle of the action is an added bonus to the prophetic vision of what embroils our age. — Hilaire Belloc

Had there been any existent vital and energetic institution left in Society after the Reformation for the use of small property in coordinated form-that is, in combination, so that the average man's holding could be put to useful purpose in company with the holdings of a great number of other men of his own sort, the new evils would not have arisen. — Hilaire Belloc

Even if the wealth and power be well distributed throughout a community, its members will not be happy unless they are inwardly so, and obviously where the distribution is bad, where the few have a vast superfluity and the many are consumed by anxiety or want, or where a few controllers can exercise their will over the many, society has failed, even though its total wealth and power be increased. — Hilaire Belloc

If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language. — Hilaire Belloc

He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves. — Hilaire Belloc

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

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it. — Hilaire Belloc

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

Since it is to the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as possible, even well-paid labor will have no more than what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labor will commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labor, that relief would compete in the labor market; check or dry up the supply of wage-labor. It would tend to render the performance of work by the wage-earner redundant. — Hilaire Belloc

Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils. The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor; a demand which threatens the very existence of PROFIT (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes). The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production. — Hilaire Belloc

Communism worked honestly by officials devoid of human frailties and devoted to nothing but the good of its slaves, would have certain manifest material advantages as compared with a proletarian wage-system where millions live in semi-starvation, and many millions more in permanent dread thereof. But even if it were administered thus Communism would only produce its benefits through imposing slavery. — Hilaire Belloc

Dear Grandmamma, with what we give. We humbly pray that you may live. For many, many happy years: Although you bore us all to tears. — Hilaire Belloc

The machine does not control the mind of man, though it affects the mind of man; it is the mind of man that can and should control the machine. — Hilaire Belloc

A strong Protectionist, believes
In everything but Heaven.
For entertainment, dines, receives,
Unmarried, 57. — Hilaire Belloc

The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie. — Hilaire Belloc

Steep are the seas and savaging and cold
In broken waters terrible to try;
And vast against the winter night the wold,
And harbourless for any sail to lie.
But you shall lead me to the lights, and I
Shall hymn you in a harbour story told.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die. — Hilaire Belloc

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone. — Hilaire Belloc

Take the particular trick of false names. It seems to us particularly odious. We think when we show our contempt for those who use this subterfuge that we are giving them no more than they deserve. It is a meanness which we associate with criminals and vagabonds; a piece of crawling and sneaking ... Men whose race is universally known, will unblushingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their original and true name be used in its place. — Hilaire Belloc

A Catholic culture does not mean or imply universality. A nation or a whole civilization is of the Catholic culture not when it is entirely composed of strong believers minutely practicing their religion, nor even whit it boasts a majority of such, but when it presents a determining number of units-family institutions, individuals, inspired by and tenacious of the Catholic spirit. — Hilaire Belloc

The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom. — Hilaire Belloc

The terror in which English capitalists now stand of organized proletarian resistance gives to the naturally protected craft organizations the power to receive the wages they demand. They act as they have been trained to act by capitalist society, which denies the doctrine of the Just Price, which proclaims work to be an evil and the goal of human endeavor to be the avoidance of it; which puts it up as an ideal that individuals should get as much money as they possibly can out of their fellows by any means in their power. — Hilaire Belloc

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography. — Hilaire Belloc

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends. — Hilaire Belloc

Upon being asked by a Reader whether the verses contained in this book were true. And is it True? It is not True. And if it were it wouldn't do, For people such as me and you Who pretty nearly all day long Are doing something rather wrong. Because if things were really so, You would have perished long ago, And I would not have lived to write The noble lines that meet your sight, Nor B. T. B. survived to draw The nicest things you ever saw. H. B. — Hilaire Belloc

It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them. — Hilaire Belloc

What followed for two hours was such an adventure as only wretched amateurs would indulge in... — Hilaire Belloc

Torture will give a dozen pence or more To keep a drab from bawling at his door. The public taste is quite a different thing Torture is positively paid to sing. — Hilaire Belloc

Of courtesy, it is much less Than courage of heart or holiness, Yet in my walks it seems to me That the Grace of God is in courtesy. — Hilaire Belloc

When well-divided property has disappeared and Capitalism has taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural economic tendencies. — Hilaire Belloc

That I grow sour, who only lack delight; That I descend to sneer, who only grieve: That from my depth I should contemn your height; That with my blame my mockery you receive; Huntress and splendour of the woodland night, Diana of this world, do not believe. — Hilaire Belloc

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death. — Hilaire Belloc

For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man. — Hilaire Belloc

There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men. — Hilaire Belloc

But though Usury is in itself immoral, and justly condemned by every ethical code, its chief and worst defect in the particular case we are now examining, the growth of Capitalism and its increasing proletariat, is the centralization of irresponsible control over the lives of men: the putting power over the proletariat into the hands of a few who can direct the loans of currency and credit without which that proletariat could not be fed and clothed and maintained in work. — Hilaire Belloc

It has long been recognized by public men of all kinds ... that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics. — Hilaire Belloc

The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast. — Hilaire Belloc

One man in one mood will attack Industrial Capitalism for its destruction of beauty; another for its incompetence; another for the vileness of the men who chiefly prosper under it; another for its mere confusion and noise; another for its false values; it was until recently most fiercely attacked for its impoverishment of the workers, its margin of unemployment and the rest - indeed so fiercely that it was compelled to seek palliatives for the evil. With a mass of men it was attacked from a vague but strong sense of injustice; it allowed a few rich to exploit mankind. — Hilaire Belloc

In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom. — Hilaire Belloc

Ownership by delegation is a contradiction in terms. When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property-such as a Town Park-and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care of the affection of a thing which is his own. — Hilaire Belloc

The tender Evenlode that makes Her meadows hush to hear the sound Of waters mingling in the brakes, And binds my heart to English ground. A lovely river, all alone, She lingers in the hills and holds A hundred little towns of stone, Forgotten in the western wolds. — Hilaire Belloc

The accursed power which stands on privilege( and goes with women, champagne and bridge)
Broke - and democracy resumed her reign ( which goes with bridge and women and champagne. — Hilaire Belloc

Matilda told such dreadful lies, It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes Her aunt, who, from her earliest youth, Had kept a strict regard for truth, Attempted to believe Matilda The effort very nearly killed her. — Hilaire Belloc

The smaller man approaching our modern banking system, which controls all issue of credit and therefore pretty well all our industrial and commercial activities, is not what the controllers of that credit call "interesting." He borrows with difficulty and upon high terms, and must pledge security out of all proportion to that which his richer rival has to put down. — Hilaire Belloc