Of all forms of stupidity the most crass, the most tedious, and yet the most exasperating is learned stupidity; a pompous furniture of accumulated facts unrelated by the intelligence. We all know the symptoms. There is the use of a jargon to impress the gaping public and the substitution of specialist unfamiliar terms for plain English. There is the constant respectful allusion by one pedant to this, that and the other pedant, so as to present the whole herd of them as a sort of sacred college....

The soul of the error is a substitution of hypothesis for fact: the putting forward of what is in truth mere guesswork as affirmations, and the spinning of endless theories, any one of which is held respectable on condition that it contradicts traditional knowledge and the plain statements of the past. 

The Bible has been made a playground, apparently inexhaustible in its resources for people of this kind. They are so lost to common sense that they solemnly present great poems as being the products not of poets but of committees. Splendid passages of descriptive prose they imagine to have been pierced together out of discordant fragments. They will talk in the most familiar way of wholly imaginary documents and by their aid dissolve all straightforward narrative, and incidentally all the dignity of just expression.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Battleground

Epitach on the Politician Himself

EPITAPH ON THE POLITICIAN HIMSELF 

Here richly, with ridiculous display, 

The Politician's corpse was laid away. 

While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged 

I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged. 

Another on the Same 

This, the last ornament among the peers, 

Bribed, bullied, swindled and blackmailed for years: 

But Death's what even Politicians fail 

To bribe or swindle, bully or blackmail. 

On Another Politician 

The Politician, dead and turned to clay, 

Will make a clout to keep the wind away. 

I am not fond of draughts, and yet I doubt 

If I could get myself to touch that clout.  

On Yet Another 

Fame to her darling Shifter glory gives; 

And Shifter is immortal while he lives. 

Epitaph Upon Himself 

Lauda tu Ilarion audacem et splendidum, 

Who was always beginning things and never ended 'em. 

-Hilaire Belloc

From the (ironic) Preface to Hilaire Belloc's book The Battleground :-)

This book needs a brief apology. The writer has not only taken for granted that there is a God, but also design in the Universe and in the story of Mankind. He has affirmed a special design in the story of Syria and especially Israel, reaching a climax at the Crucifixion. He even seems to imply the Divinity of his Saviour.

All this must sound so unusual today that it may be thought an affectation, deliberately assumed to startle and offend. Such a feeling will be enhanced by the discovery that he takes the Gospel of St. John to have been written by St. John and even allows some historical value in the Old Testament.

The sole excuse he offers for his extravagance is that the present Generation is tolerant of novel ideas, and that he therefore may hope for indulgence.

"All language is shorthand..."

All language is shorthand; any sentence to express reality must be modified indefinitely...

-Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic (1931)