“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
- Aesop
And I’ve always felt this quote from Chesterton’s contemporary, Hillaire Belloc, was ever timely:
“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.”
Where is the quote from Belloc taken? From his prophetic work on Islam, the name of which escapes me at the moment (Survivals and New Arrivals?)
Until Francis decided to lift Newman to the glories of the altar, my tagline was a line from Chesterton:
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
My present one is from Newman, though unfortunately it is too long to include attribution.