Quotes About Barbarism

There can be no compromise between wrong and right. Germany is wrong and the Allies are right. The devastations of Belgium and the atrocities of the invading horde of barbarians are an outrage to civilized mankind.

So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.

A world where a man is able to hunt his fellow man! How could he be called a man?

Wisdom is the last word of a dying civilization, the halo of historical sunsets, fatigue turned into a worldview, the final tolerance before the rise of fresher gods—and barbarism.

A civilization develops from agriculture to the paradox. Between these two extremities occurs the struggle between barbarism and neurosis: resulting in the unstable equilibrium of creative epochs. This struggle is reaching its end: All horizons are opening without any being able to excite a curiosity at once weary and awakened. It is then up to the disabused individual to flourish in the void, up to the intellectual vampire to lap up the tainted blood of civilizations.

Races may accumulate accomplishments, yet remain organically unchanged. They may learn and they may forget, they may rise from barbarism to culture, and sink back from culture to barbarism, while through all these revolutions the raw material of their humanity varies never a bit.

Some great crisis in its fate may stamp upon a race marks which neither lapse of time nor change of circumstance seem able wholly to efface; and empires may rise from barbarism to civilization and sink again from civilization into barbarism, within periods so brief that we may take it as certain, whatever be our opinion as to the transmission of acquired faculties, that no hereditary influence has had time to operate.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh. Nonviolence, the answer to the Negroes' need, may become the answer to the most desperate need of all humanity.

Barbarians!' he roared. 'Filthy barbarians!

It is dreadful to hear time and again that National Socialism is a return to barbarism, to the Dark Ages, to times before any new progress toward humanitarianism was made, without these speakers even suspecting that precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanitarianism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper.

There is no document of civilization," he wrote, "which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." That line is on his tombstone now.

The full flowering of human resilience is awesome," he says. Every human being is born with the strength to heal. No amount of violence or torture can destroy that capacity. No barbarism or savagery can crush the ability to recover and rebuild. "Even in the most hopeless human being," he tells me, "there is hope.

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.

Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama.

Indiscriminate firing by police on people is absolute barbarism. Instead of solving their problems, the government is trying to suppress the people by force.

Time was when genius was more precious than gold, but now to have nothing is monstrous barbarism.

La mayoría de las sociedades han sido regidas por los bárbaros y los hechiceros.

There are] two states of barbarism, one caused by ignorance, the other (for which there is far less hope of remedy), by the excess and abuse of knowledge. (13 January 1857)

Is it not very clear that progress, that is to say, the onward march of all things, good as well as evil, has brought our civilization to the brink of an abyss into which it may possibly fall, giving place to utter barbarism? And the reason for this…is it not to be found in the law that dominates all others here below, the need for change in some form or other? We must change. (Monday 23 April 1849)

Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf.

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.