Quotes from Hilaire Belloc

The absolute monopoly of the soil, the gripping and the strangling of the populace by landlords, is a purely Protestant development.

Capitalism must be kept alive by non-capitalist methods.

I watched a train come in. It was full of tourists, who (it may have been a subjective illusion) seemed to me common and worthless people, and sad into the bargain.

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.

Bridgehead beyond, upon the southern shore. And thereby, should help come to them, they might cross the Loire in strength into Charles's land and perhaps overcome him yet.

Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the Distributive State.

Some Generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment... 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.

To begin at the beginning is, next to ending at the end, the whole art of writing; as for the middle you may fill it in with any rubble that you choose.

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

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'

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