Barbarian Quotes

the veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin

You didn't find any trace of her?" asked d'Arnot. // Tarzan shook his head. "None. In the jungle, I could have found her; but here –-here, in civilization, a man cannot even find himself.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Do you ever read the scriptures?""Every day," I said enthusiastically, "not a moment passes that I don't have a quick read of Ieremias or dip into Ezekiel."She smiled, amused. "What a barbarian you are!

Bernard Cornwell

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.

Alexander the Great

You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body.

Now that the wars are coming to an end, I wish you to prosper in peace. May all mortals from now on live like one people in concord and for mutual advancement. Consider the world as your country, with laws common to all and where the best will govern irrespective of tribe. I do not distinguish among men, as the narrow-minded do, both among Greeks and Barbarians. I am not interested in the descendance of the citizens or their racial origins. I classify them using one criterion: their virtue. For me every virtuous foreigner is a Greek and every evil Greek worse than a Barbarian. If differences ever develop between you never have recourse to arms, but solve them peacefully. If necessary, I should be your arbitrator.

Alexander the Great

Ah, I see. You don't know much about us and the unknown equals the barbaric, the primitive. Although it is you lot who are ignorant.

Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.

Peter Sloterdijk

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.(In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)

Ovid

If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos…

Alexander the Great

Passion and courtesy are two polar opposite traits that serve to balance each other into a full-blooded whole.Without socialization, passion is a crude barbarian, and without passion, the elegant and polite are dead.Allow both passion and courtesy into your life in equal measure, and be complete.

I don't believe in virgin sacrifice. It encourages promiscuity at an early age

Adrianne Ambrose

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw

We human beings regard ourselves as (or compare ourselves to) animals only when it suits us.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Peace ought not be regarded the height of civilization, else like barbarians we forever battle for peace.