Wish I'd said that - January 24, 2018

"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 these faces there is no smile."

Hilaire Belloc, quoted in “The Catholic Buckley” in George William Rutler He Spoke to Us, saying they were "written after gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city destroyed by the Vandals”