Quotes About Barbarians

Barbarians are all alike... sit up half the night to discuss anything a Roman says.

Canada, he told me one day through squinted eyes and smoke rings, is full of violent cowards. People believe they are gentile, but they attack in quiet ways. They use their intellect, their knowledge, always trying to prove they are smarter, more important. The man with no ego is the gentle man, Canada is a land of civilized barbarians.

the Rhine was to be the permanent boundary between Romanized Gaul and the barbarians of central Europe.

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

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.

Philip was ideally suited to lead the expedition against the Persian 'barbarians'.

539, great numbers of them, called 'Huns' by Procopius, crossed the Danube

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.

At the moment we have unemployment, of course, and a shortage of orders, and tight credit, but those are only necessary phases of readjustment. Sometimes I wonder whether the Roman patricians didn't secretly long for the barbarians... And too, there are always those who mistake their own dilapidated condition for the decadence of a civilization.

I think Compton is right when he says that the reason the English use this word is because it is they who think of us as 'barbarians'. They want war, so they are looking for excuses and even a word will do.

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

But Paul, in his preaching of the Gospel, is a debtor to deliver the word not to Barbarians only, but also to Greeks, and not only to the unwise, who would easily agree with him, but also to the wise.

We must assent to the will of Heaven above and conform to the wishes of men on earth below, but the government should assert the majesty of its warlike might in order to drive away the hordes of fierce and cruel men. We know that the dispositions of these outer barbarians are as ravenous as those of wolves.

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

how a people who had raised such mighty works, could have allowed themselves to be conquered by illiterate barbarians.

Some scholars, including Weatherford, believe that the Great Wall of China was built as much to keep their own people in as to keep the "barbarians" out.

With civilization too comes another change: men wish not only to tell what they have seen, but also to express what they are conscious of. Barbarians feel only hunger, and that is not lyrical; but as time runs on, arise gentler emotions and finer moods and more delicate desires which need expression, and require from the artist's fancy the lightest touches and the most soothing and insinuating words.

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.

But experience shows that in spite of our infinite care in choosing our successors the mediocre emperors will always outnumber the wise, and that at least one fool will be reign per century. In time of crisis these bureaus, if well organized, will go on with what must be done, filling the interim between two good rulers. Some emperors like to parade behind them whole lines of barbarians, bound at the neck, those interminable processions of the conquered.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.

The Romans were not wiped out by the invasions of the barbarians, nor by the Christian virus, but by a more subtle evil, boredom.

The Empire was falling, the Barbarians were on the move.... What was to be done, except to escape the age? Happy moment, when there is still somewhere to go, when the empty places were accessible and welcoming! We have been dispossessed of everything, even the desert.

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.