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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.