Barbarians Quotes

• Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

  Leonard Woolf

  Character, Men, Effort

  Leonard Woolf (1939). “Barbarians Within and Without”

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• War is the business of barbarians.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Peace, War, Anti War

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• What shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

  C.P. Cavafy

  Kindness, People, Solutions

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• I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Knowledge, Too Much, Recovering

  J. M. Coetzee (1980). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Penguin Group USA

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• Homosexuality is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love - all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce.

  Plato

  Powerful, Philosophy, Gay

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• The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Race, Law, Civilization

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• If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

  Thomas Sowell

  Winning, Civilization, Battle

  Thomas Sowell (2013). “Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays”, p.328, Hoover Press

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• The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

  William Hazlitt

  Thinking, Prejudice, Taste

  William Hazlitt (1837). “Characteristics: in the manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims [by W. Hazlitt].”, p.119

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• One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Night, Cities, Pyramids

  J. M. Coetzee (1980). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Penguin Group USA

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• 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

  Religious, Thought Provoking, Curiosity

  Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.2, Princeton University Press

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• 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

  Self, Differences, People

  Karl Marx (1973). “Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy”, Vintage Books USA

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• We are standing face to face with the barbarians. The enemy is no longer outside but inside the City, and the ruling ideology, paralysed, is incapable of spotting him. It stammers, overcome by its own moral disarmament, and is giving up: this is the time to seize the reins. Present society is an accomplice to the evil that is devouring it.

  Guillaume Faye

  Giving Up, Cities, Evil

  Guillaume Faye, Michael O'Meara (2010). “Archeofuturism”, p.18, Arktos

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• What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today.

  C.P. Cavafy

  Waiting, Today, Forums

  Constantine P. Cavafy, “Waiting For The Barbarians”

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• Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

  Pierre Schaeffer

  Thinking, Civilization

  "Pierre Schaeffer: an Interview with the Pioneer of Musique Concrete". Records Quarterly magazine, vol. 2, n° 1, 1987.

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• Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

  George Santayana

  Change, Children, Persistence

  George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

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• Here in Canada, in the Western world, we are inside the walls. Outside the walls are the barbarians.

  Barbara Amiel

  Wall, World, Canada

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• The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to US power for the sake of America's interests.

  Breyten Breytenbach

  America, Goal, Ungrateful

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• As a result, I've been portrayed as a cynical barbarian preying on the very clients I was charged to defend.

  Jack Abramoff

  Cynical, Clients, Results

  "Jack in a Box". Zagorin, A., content.time.com. April 30, 2005.

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• 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

  Civilization, Generations, Too Late

  Thomas Sowell (2007). “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”, p.108, Hachette UK

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• 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

  America, Justice, Our Society

  Culture and Anarchy preface (1869)

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• Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Civilization, People, Corruption

  J. M. Coetzee (1980). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Penguin Group USA

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• The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Class, Century, Middle

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• If there were a clear prospect that such evils were part of a barbarian past, then at least we might find a small crumb of comfort. No such prospect exists: no scientific analysis can even remotely answer or account for past and present horrors of human behaviour.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Past, Perspective, Evil

  "The Crucible of Creation". Book by Simon Conway Morris, 1998.

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• If you go back to the Conan the Barbarian series, I really liked that.

  Andre Braugher

  Conan, Series, Ifs

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• No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money

  Samuel Gompers

  Children, Race, Economic Inequality

  Samuel Gompers, Stuart Bruce Kaufman, Peter J. Albert, Marla J. Hughes, Mary C. Jeske (1991). “The Samuel Gompers Papers: A national labor movement takes shape, 1895-98”, p.48, University of Illinois Press

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