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

Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.

The grace of God is courtesy.

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.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

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.