Quotes About Barbarians

Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.

They will only bring it down!" The secretary's voice was uncomprehending. Crispin did turn then, to look back over his shoulder. They were staring at him, the three of them, so were the others in the Sanctuary. He said, "I understand. But they will have to DO that. Bring it down. I will make what I make, in this civilized, holy place. Others will have to give the orders to destroy. As barbarians once destroyed Rhodias...since it could not defend itself.

I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.

Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

Jackie added in White's article, read by millions, that the Kennedy administration had been Camelot, a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers, and poets met at the White House and the barbarians beyond the walls were held back. But it will never be that way again. . . . There'll never be another Camelot again.76

I'm organized, but receipts tend to mess up my system. They're barbarians! So I store them in a notepad.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

Integral to this was the regime's unchanging manichean discourse – i.e. its ideological and cultural discourse of the civil war as a battle of "morality vs. iniquity", of "martyrs against barbarians".

Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao.

the emperor does not govern the barbarians. Those who come to him will not be rejected, and those who leave will not be pursued."28 The objective was a compliant, divided periphery, rather than one directly under Chinese control.

Herd!" repeated Petronius, with contempt; "a people worthy of Cæsar!" And he began to think that a society resting on superior force, on cruelty of which even barbarians had no conception, on crimes and mad profligacy, could not endure. Rome ruled the world, but was also its ulcer.

Desdemona had learned early in life that the world was divided into two groups, those who loved the theater and barbarians.

History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.

Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.

What do you know of a place called 'the colonies'?" "Oh, you'd not be wantin' to be goin' there, sir! 'Tis a heathen place, full up wit' barbarians. I 'ear men there actually fight fer what they believe in…

The moment of a fall from greatness often comes just when a people and a nation feel most secure. The cry the barbarians are at the gates too often comes as a terrifying bolt out of the blue, which is often the last cry ever heard.

The fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarians.

English lecturers... who treat the Americans as a race of barbarians without any history should be taken for a tour round Washington before they are permitted to speak!

night is here but the barbarians have not come. And some people arrived from the borders, and said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution.

Books were despised by the Viking Tribes, as they were seen as a horrible civilizing influence and a threat to the barbarian culture.

The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their newly founded States.

They'd poisoned me, dammit. Probably to trade my dead body to the barbarians for Wulfgar's safe return. Or maybe just for the fun of it.

We ask what is the origin of marriage, and we are told that like the right of property, after many wars and contests, it has gradually arisen out of the selfishness of barbarians.