“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”
Remark (undated) to William Temple, quoted in Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), p. 383
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Hilaire Belloc 91
writer 1870–1953Related quotes

“The world's oldest globalist institution? Catholic church.”
"The Remnant Tapes" https://web.archive.org/web/20180914075854/https://theremnant-tapes.nationalreview.com/theremnant-060-09.13.2018.mp3 (13 September 2018), National Review
2010s, 2018

Letter to Thomas Cooper (3 November 1822), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, p. 272
1820s

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 185

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1868/apr/03/adjourned-debate#column_917 in the House of Commons (3 April 1868)

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Source: 1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 16.
Context: The Republican candidate was elected, and solid substantial people of the North-west, and I presume the same order of people throughout the entire North, felt very serious, but determined, after this event. It was very much discussed whether the South would carry out its threat to secede and set up a separate government, the corner-stone of which should be, protection to the 'Divine' institution of slavery. For there were people who believed in the 'divinity' of human slavery, as there are now people who believe Mormonism and Polygamy to be ordained by the Most High. We forgive them for entertaining such notions, but forbid their practice.