Hilaire Belloc Quotes

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

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ownership is not a general feature of our society, determining its character. On the contrary, dependence on a precarious wage at the will of others is the general feature of our society.

To control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.

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

How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say 'No' at the same time, it sounds like neighing - yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.

If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record.

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.

Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.

The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition.

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

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.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.

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.

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

Put you hand before your eyes and remember, you that have walked, the places from which you have walked away, and the wilderness into which you manfully turned the steps of your abandonment ... It is your business to leave all that you have know altogether behind you, and no man has eyes at the back of his head - go forward.

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

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.

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.

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.

Property, as a general social institution, well-divided property, having disappeared and Capitalism having taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural economic tendencies.

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.

We cannot make owners by merely giving men something to own. And, I repeat, whether there be sufficient desire for property left upon which we can work, only experience can decide.

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.

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.

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.'

But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens the possessors of property with personal control over it, as individuals or as families. For property is the necessary condition of economic freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has not property is under economic servitude to him who has property, whether the possessor of it be another individual or the State.