Barbarism Quotes - Page 6

• It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called "barbarism" and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Rhetorical Strategies, Law, Catholic

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• A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves out to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming age of barbarism and darkness.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Men, Community, Darkness

  "After Virtue". Book by Alasdair MacIntyre, 1981.

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• Protecting life is a value that matters. Whether it is stopping partial birth abortion which I think is a barbarism. Or whether it is fairly enforcing the criminal laws against Planned Parenthood.

  Ted Cruz

  Thinking, Law, Abortion

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• Were I asked to define it, I should reply that archeology is that science which enables us to register and classify our knowledge of the sum of man's achievement in those arts and handicrafts whereby he has, in time past, signalized his passage from barbarism to civilization.

  Amelia B. Edwards

  Art, Knowledge, Science

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• The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy.

  Antoine Rivarol

  People, Political, Steel

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• It is time that capital and labor realized that their interests are really comutual, as interdependent as the brain and the body; time they ceased their fratricidal strife and, uniting their mighty forces under the flag of Progress, completed the conquest of the world and doomed Poverty, Ignorance and Vice... Unless labor is employed, capital cannot increase - it cannot concentrate. Unless property rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to barbarism.

  William Cowper Brann

  Ignorance, Rights, Perfect

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• The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine, and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal mines.

  John T. Flynn

  Peace, Moving, Destiny

  John T. Flynn (1944). “As We Go Marching”

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• Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

  Theodor Adorno

  Writing, Self, Long

  "Cultural Criticism and Society". Essay by Theodor Adorno (1949), reprinted in his book "Prisms", 1967.

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• It is absurd to expect governments to descend gradually, step-by-step into barbarism - as if there was a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way.

  James Bovard

  Government, People, Political

  James Bovard (2015). “Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen”, p.222, Macmillan

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• What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

  Anatole France

  Past, Men, Civilization

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• African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism.

  Laurence M. Keitt

  War, Political, Fabric

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• In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.

  Edward Gibbon

  Fall, Rome, Christianity

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• The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

  Alfred de Vigny

  War, Men, Soldier

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• There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Support, Helping, Slaughter

  "The Day Carlos Fuentes Took to Twitter". mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com. May 15, 2012.

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• With all my heart I believe that the world's present system of sovereign nations can only lead to barbarism, war and inhumanity, and that only world law can assure progress towards a civilized peaceful community.

  Albert Einstein

  War, Believe, Heart

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• I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish. ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.

  George Henry Borrow

  Hero, Race, People

  George Henry Borrow (1852). “Roving Adventures, Or Lavengro: The Scholar - the Gipsy - the Priest”, p.138

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• The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.

  Thucydides

  Wine, Vines, Olives

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• If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

  Edouard Daladier

  Military, War, Fighting

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• The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Civilization, Two, Savages

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• This year has begun hopefully for right thinkers. After all these centuries of feudal barbarism and political slavery, it is surprising to see how the word of 'liberty' sets minds on fire.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Fire, Years, Political

  Napoleon Bonaparte (2010). “The Corsican: The Virtual Diary of Napoleon Bonaparte”, p.4, Fireship Press

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• There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

  Charlie Pierce

  Hands, Law, Roots

  "The Violence We Live With" by Charles P. Pierce, www.esquire.com. April 18, 2013.

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• Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.

  Jane Jacobs

  Taken, Cities, People

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.30, Vintage

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• The idea of Socialism is at once grandiose and simple. . .We may say, in fact, that it is one of the most ambitious creations of the human spirit, . . .so magnificent, so daring, that it has rightly aroused the greatest admiration. If we wish to save the world from barbarism we have to refute Socialism, but we cannot thrust it carelessly aside.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Simple, Ideas, Wish

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• Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.

  Augustus William Hare

  Country, Civilization, Causes

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• Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire.

  Edward Gibbon

  Country, Powerful, History

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.37, Wordsworth Editions

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