“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 creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on those faces, there is no smile.”
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc aka Hilaire Belloc
Anglo-French writer, historian, orator, poet, sailor, soldier & political activist.
(1870 - 1953)