Hilaire Belloc Quotes

In the Seventeenth Century a man feared to go to Mass lest the Judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favor of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.

But there is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others. Therefore with the advance of this new and terrible enemy against the Faith and all that civilization which the Faith produces, there is coming not only a contempt for beauty but a hatred of it; and immediately upon the heels of this there appears a contempt and hatred for virtue.

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 or the affection of a thing which is his own; still less can a man express himself through the use of a thing which is not his own, but shared in common with a mass of other men.

economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.

Capitalism must be kept alive by non-capitalist methods.

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known.

I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not the year or the month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second) when a man is grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is, backwards), and feels solidly himself. Do I make myself clear? No matter, it is the Shock of Maturity, and that must suffice for you.

Ha de saberse que si se cede a una tentación, muy luego se presenta como el rayo la oportunidad de incurrir en ella.

"What we call "the Reformation" was essentially the reaction of the barbaric, the ill-tutored and the isolated places external to the old and deep-rooted Roman civilization, against the influences of that civilization."

In the English County of Sussex, upon the clay thereof, and upon a slight eminence of that clay, stood and stands a squire's house called Rackham.

And you, Archers and Barrack-room companions of war, of high birth or of low, who stand before the good town of Orleans, be off, in the name of God, to your own Country. King of England, if you will not do so, I am a Leader in War and in what ever place I may find your folk in France I will turn them out willy nilly, and who will not obey I shall kill and who will obey I shall spare. Nor believe that you can hold aught of the Realm of France. No, by God, the Son of Mary! Charles the King will hold it, the right heir. For God the King of Heaven wills it so, as the Maid has revealed to him. He will come at last into Paris with a goodly company. If you will not hearken to the words of God by the mouth of the Maid, in whatever place we find you we will strike great swinges and make such a rough-and-tumble as has not been raised in France this thousand years. Then shall we see which has better right from the God of Heaven, we or you!

Let us suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another.

You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, or to find a beach looking westward at evening over unfrequented seas. But the great mass of men love companionship so much that nothing seems of any worth compared with it. Human communion is their meat and drink, and so they use the railways to make bigger and bigger hives for themselves.

A man going uphill may be at the same level as another man going down hill; but they are facing different ways and have different destinies. Our world, passing out of the old Paganism of Greece and Rome towards the consummation of Christendom and a Catholic civilization from which we all derive, is the very negation of the same world leaving the light of its ancestral religion and sliding back into the dark.

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.