Top 100 Quotes About Barbarians
#1. This is good, life must continue, we are fighting barbarians, but we must remain human.
David Benioff
#2. Unlike Europe, China can't be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they've been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don't see any need to.
Noam Chomsky
#3. Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.
Pierre Schaeffer
#4. These squatters aren't just aliens, drifters and undesirables. They're new world barbarians, conquering free spaces and making them their own.
James W. Bodden
#5. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.
Susan Sontag
#6. Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.
Tom Holland
#7. We are the new "barbarians", forged in iron hardness in the fires of their hate and persecution. All over the world, we wait to pounce ...
George Lincoln Rockwell
#8. If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
Thomas Sowell
#9. Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
Thomas Sowell
#10. Basque and Celt. Criminals and barbarians. I didn't think there could be a more primitive pairing of genes.
Karen Marie Moning
#12. Barbarians!' he roared. 'Filthy barbarians!
Emily Rodda
#13. Without education and understanding, the barbarians would have outnumbered us and swarmed the city gates a long time ago.
Peter F. Hamilton
#14. In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.
Fernando Pessoa
#15. I believe that the women were called by the Dodonaeans "doves" because they were barbarians, and so they seemed to the people of Dodona to talk like birds.
Herodotus
#16. I assure you that in all matters of discretion not involving food, we make etiquette tutors look like slobbering barbarians.
Scott Lynch
#17. Anyone happy in this age and place Is daft or corrupt. Better to abdicate From a material and spiritual terrain Fit only for barbarians.
Roy Fuller
#18. Is Islam a religion of peace? I'm sure for some of the practitioners, but it's been hijacked by people who have an ideology that wants to destroy western civilization, and they're barbarians.
Jeb Bush
#19. How DARE you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library? Play conqueror all you want, Mighty Caesar! Rape, murder, pillage thousands, even millions of human beings! But neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought!
William Shakespeare
#20. You can never destroy the barbarian culture of hatred, violence, and death by killing barbarians. You have to destroy the philosophy that makes them barbarian.
Debasish Mridha
#21. But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.
Karl Marx
#22. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.
Vernon Lee
#23. Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice ... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
Michel De Montaigne
#24. Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#25. But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.
Edward Gibbon
#26. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.
Victor Hugo
#27. A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians - men who see clearly enough the barbarity of all ages except their own.
Ernest Howard Crosby
#28. However, while the Nazi barbarians and their collaborators threatened the entire world, I could not accept his philosophy and, after several earlier attempts, was finally accepted into the Canadian Infantry Corps during the last year of World War II.
Walter Kohn
#29. Of course the barbarians' aim of world domination has not escaped the attention of the Europeans, perhaps because unlike us they are closer to the walls.
Barbara Amiel
#30. No. You should take pleasure in following the Lethani. If you fight well, you should take pride in doing a thing well. For the fighting itself you should feel only duty and sorrow. Only barbarians and madmen take pleasure in combat. Whoever loves the fight itself has left the Lethani behind.
Patrick Rothfuss
#31. France, because it was attacked cowardly, shamelessly, violently, France will be merciless against the barbarians of Daesh.
Francois Hollande
#32. I question whether any Turk, of all that have entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I hounour the barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman.
Thomas De Quincey
#33. The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.
Rodney Stark
#34. Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.
Walter Savage Landor
#36. You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.
Christopher Isherwood
#37. The moment of a fall from greatness often comes just when a people and a nation feel most secure. The cry "the barbarians are at the gates" too often comes as a terrifying bolt out of the blue, which is often the last cry ever heard.
William R. Forstchen
#38. Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.
Edward Gibbon
#39. ....night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
Constantinos P. Cavafis
#40. Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.
Isaiah Berlin
#41. As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.
Bruno Schulz
#42. When Angkorian society began, Paris and London were not much more than elaborate villages. Europe was crawling with barbarians, and here were the Khmer engineering sophisticated irrigation systems and constructing the biggest temple in the world.
Kim Fay
#43. The world is in an eternal struggle against good and evil," he would say to me. "But the most important war is fought here." Ilyas would tap his chest. "It is not the barbarians, nor even the Druj, that we must fear the most, Nazafareen. It is the enemy within." I
Kat Ross
#44. What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today.
C.P. Cavafy
#45. Why is she afraid?" he asked. "She's not Anjin-san. Just a little nervous. Please excuse her. She's never seen a foreigner close to before." "Tell her when the moon's full, barbarians sprout horns and fire comes out of our mouths like dragons.
James Clavell
#46. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933 ... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.
Charles Krauthammer
#47. People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.
George Lucas
#48. It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#49. There's a sense of incomprehensible apocalypse in the air - we all feel it - and there's a rumor going around: the barbarians are coming.
Alessandro Baricco
#50. School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians
Edward Albee
#51. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians ... These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me the barbarian army and I will believe.
J.M. Coetzee
#52. Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it's something.
Dean Koontz
#53. Barbarians have no woman to teach them civilization. Barbarians cannot learn." I
Patrick Rothfuss
#54. The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you
Christopher Hitchens
#55. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
Thomas Sowell
#56. We ask what is the origin of marriage, and we are told that like the right of property, after many wars and contests, it has gradually arisen out of the selfishness of barbarians.
Plato
#57. In the ordinary course of things, how many succeed in society merely by virtue of their manners, while others, however meritorious, fail through lack of them? After all, it's only barbarians who wear uncut precious stones.
Lord Chesterfield
#58. They'd poisoned me, dammit. Probably to trade my dead body to the barbarians for Wulfgar's safe return. Or maybe just for the fun of it.
Vivian Vande Velde
#60. Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians - we call them 'children'.
Hannah Arendt
#61. The Tippoo's life seemed charmed. He stepped in blood, but none of it was his and it seemed as though he could not die, but only kill, and so he did, cold-bloodedly, deliberately, exultantly defending his city and his dream against the barbarians who had come to snatch his tiger throne.
Bernard Cornwell
#62. The Thracian people, like the bloodiest of the barbarians, being ever most murderous when it has nothing to fear.
Thucydides
#63. The Guti were a band of mountain barbarians. It's always the way, isn't it? Everything is blamed on 'the barbarians
Stephen Fry
#64. He couldn't drive the horror of cannibalism from his brain, just as he couldn't wholly suppress a simple observation that seemed to rebut their savagery: these were the nicest man-eating barbarians a lonely wanderer could ever hope to encounter.
Monte Reel
#65. It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
Garrison Keillor
#66. Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!
James Goldman
#67. As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nursling's of man.
George R. Stewart
#68. To the Greeks [the Macedonians] were uncouth, semi-civilized barbarians. The Macedonians for their part despised the Greeks as effete, wishy-washy Greeklings. Both regarded the Thracians as scarcely capable of walking on their hind legs.
Nicholas Sekunda
#69. Children and barbarians have clear ideas of justice due to them, but no idea at all of justice due from them.
Murray Leinster
#70. From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.
Louis Kronenberger
#71. But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren't storming the gates.
Steven Johnson
#72. The union of the Roman empire was dissolved; its genius was humbled in the dust; and armies of unknown barbarians, issuing from the frozen regions of the North, had established their victorious reign over the fairest provinces of Europe and Africa.
Edward Gibbon
#73. I think future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave a chance to live.
Marco Rubio
#74. The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics [monks], incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity; and the Imperial troops acknowledged, without shame, that they were much less apprehensive of an encounter with the fiercest Barbarians.
Edward Gibbon
#75. Here in Canada, in the Western world, we are inside the walls. Outside the walls are the barbarians.
Barbara Amiel
#76. Among the conservative Greek opinion there would be no regrets that Alexander the Greek leader was invading the barbarians.
Robin Lane Fox
#77. The Clave thinks the wards will stand forever because they've stood for a thousand years. But so did Rome, till the barbarians came. Everything falls someday
Cassandra Clare
#78. Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
Walter Lippmann
#79. According to Andrew Jackson Rogers, a New Jersey Democrat, "If you pass this bill you will allow the negroes of this country to compete for the high office of President of the United States" - no "civilized" country on earth gave rights to such "barbarians.
Elizabeth R. Varon
#80. The Romans, who so coolly and so concisely mention the acts of justice which were exercised by the legions, reserve their compassion and their eloquence for their own sufferings, when the provinces were invaded and desolated by the arms of the successful Barbarians.
Edward Gibbon
#81. The Indian is one of Nature's gentlemen
he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians, who form the surplus of overpopulous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy.
Susanna Moodie
#82. Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.
Aldous Huxley
#83. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
Okakura Kakuzo
#84. It is also in theory, conceivable that some universal empire some day might cover the whole globe, leaving no external "barbarians" to serve as invaders.
Carroll Quigley
#85. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.
Mohsin Hamid
#87. Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it's been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians. Nothing
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#88. Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
Matthew Arnold
#89. How dangerous it is rashly to adopt the Mosaical institutions [Old Testament teachings of eye for an eye]. Laws might have been proper for a tribe of ardent barbarians wandering through the sands of Arabia which are wholly unfit for an enlightened people of civilized and gentle manners.
Gerald Heaney
#90. Let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now rightfully fight against barbarians.
Pope Urban II
#91. The fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarians.
Tzvetan Todorov
#92. The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
Charles Darwin
#93. Imagine our descendants in the year 2200 or 2500. They might liken us to aliens who have treated the Earth as if it were a mere stopover for refueling, or even worse, characterize us as barbarians who would ransack their own home.
Paul J. Crutzen
#94. We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English?
Edward Rutherfurd
#95. The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.
Eric Corley
#96. Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.
Bertrand Russell
#97. If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above.
Henry Demarest Lloyd
#98. I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
Barbara Tuchman
#99. And thus, the men won the Battle of the Sexes in Milesian times, so that from the Golden Age of Athens until the Golden Age of Rome, when all citizens were free to speak & vote at the State Assemblies, only women, barbarians & slaves were excluded.[INTRO]
Nicholas Chong
#100. The Gauls were endowed with all the advantages of art and nature; but as they wanted courage to defend them, they were justly condemned to obey, and even to flatter, the victorious Barbarians, by whose clemency they held their precarious fortunes and their lives.
Edward Gibbon
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