Barbarian Quotes

“Noble savage”

“Civilization”

“Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)”

“Since barbarism has its pleasures, it naturally has its apologists.”

“barbarian”

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

“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.”

“Wikipedia: Barbarian”

“Simple-minded barbarians met advanced, scholarly empire; barbarians sacked empire for shiny things.”

“Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.”

“Wikicommons: Barbarians”

“The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.”

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

“It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”

“Now you fear punishment and beg for your lives, so I will let you free, if not for any other reason so that you can see the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant, so do not expect to suffer any harm from me. A king does not kill messengers.”

“Nations are barbarian in their infancy but not savage. The barbarian is a proportional mean between the savage and the citizen. He already possesses no end of knowledge: he has habitations, some agriculture, domestic animals, laws, a cult, regular tribunals; he lacks only the sciences.”

“Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians… and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me, so that we can move against the barbarians and liberate ourselves from the Persian bondage, for as Greeks we should not be slaves to barbarians.”

“Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.”

“Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”

“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the very mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.”