Hilaire Belloc

“The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie.”

“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.”

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

“Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.”

“Money gives me pleasure all the time.”

“The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.”

“For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.”

“An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.”

“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.”

“When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.”

“The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human, and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore, he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it, and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities.”

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

“It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.”

“Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea, Are all human frame requires.”

“For no one, in our long decline,So dusty, spiteful and divided,Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,Or loved them half as much as I did.”

“I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”

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

“Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.”

“An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called "one of the decisive battles of the world.”

“Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.”