The man who predicted the resurgence of Islam

“The more important a book to our civilization, the quicker it disappears from the [library] shelves today. Recently, for instance, I discovered that the whole classics section (Greek and Roman) had been eliminated from Toronto’s Central Reference Library, on grounds of “no public interest.” And then that the classics sections in several college libraries had shrunk to the point where I now had more standard texts in my little apartment. . .

And no wonder, it seems to me, that we have ignorant mobs attacking relics of the past, such as public statuary. It becomes much easier to animate these mobs because, in the absence of materials unread and unrespected, they will believe anything about the past they are told.”

(By David Warren writing in The Catholic Thing, who was shocked to see that The Great Heresies by Hilaire Belloc had been reprinted.)