what work is this originally found in....give the quote....and not
just the source....( obviously include the source too)

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 13 May 2003 09:41 PDT

I found a 1631 reference to "belly of the beast", but not yet to the
full quote, although the spirit of the quote is undoubtedly the
Biblical story of Jonah, as tehuti-ga noted.

Do you need a quote to the full phrase, or is a 17th century "belly of
the beast" good enough?

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Request for Question Clarification by hammer-ga on 13 May 2003 11:04 PDT

maggieg,

If you have a specific need, you may want to clarify what you are
looking for. Stories about various things in the bellies of various
beasts appear in everything from ancient Greek mythology to the Bible
to Grimm's Fairy Tales. It's a very common metaphor. Did you have a
particular beast in mind?

- Hammer

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Clarification of Question by maggieg-ga on 13 May 2003 19:10 PDT

often used in a political way as in working for an organization
whenyou really oppose it and can effect change from within....very 
1960s       not like jonah etc

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Clarification of Question by maggieg-ga on 14 May 2003 06:44 PDT

want ENTIRE  quote

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 14 May 2003 06:51 PDT

Maggieg,

It's actually a little hard to know what it is you want at this
point...it no longer seems that you're looking for a quote from
hundreds of years ago.

Anyway, here's a modern quote from a political context:

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/or/or80-6.html

IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

SPEECH AT CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE AGAINST APARTHEID,
RACISM AND COLONIALISM IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Let me know if that helps.

pafalafa-ga

The Book of Jonah, in the King James Version, refers to Jonah being "n
the belly of the fish three days and three nights." Jonah 1:17 and
"out of the belly of hell cried I, [and] thou heardest my voice."
Jonah 2:2
I would guess this is the source of the saying.

"And with that the king saw coming toward him the strangest beast that
ever he saw or heard of; so the beast went to the well and drank, and
the noise was in the beast's belly like unto the questing of thirty
couple hounds; but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in
the beast's belly: and therewith the beast departed with great
noise... Pellinore, that time king, followed the questing beast."
-- Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471), "Le Morte d'Arthur" (The Death of King
Arthur), book I, chapter 19.

Perhaps the modern use of the phrase began with the Marxist
revolutionary Che Guevara:

"The consumers of these media images were urged to show the same
outpouring of concern for the welfare of the body politic as for
Reagan's natural body--in fact, the one should follow from the other.
If we think of these diagrams of Reagan's colon superimposed over a
map of the nation, Che Guevara's observation that we who live in the
States live 'in the belly of the beast' takes on a grotesque
allegorical materiality."

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Scholarly/Damon_MIAs_01.html

"Although welfare departments often acted and were perceived by poor
and minority communities as instruments of oppression, I wanted to do
social work in the ghetto. The fantasy of working subversively "in the
belly of the beast" (3) appealed to me; I didn't think through the
inherent contradictions... I've been trying to find the origin of this
New Leftist phrase, which refers to liberation struggles within a
capitalist, imperialist system. Via the internet, a librarian in
Indiana has suggested what seems to me the most likely source: a
speech by Che Guevara in which he said something like this (as
recalled by the librarian): 'I envy you North Americans. You live in
the belly of the beast.' The phrase was picked up and appropriately
used as the title of a book of letters from prison by Jack Henry
Abbott (New York: Random House, 1981)."

http://www.serve.com/BAKE/3-38.htm#38_3