Barbarian Quotes

“Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.

(In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)”
― Ovid

“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

“[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

“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

“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.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“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, Race et histoire

“I don't believe in virgin sacrifice. It encourages promiscuity at an early age”
― Adrianne Ambrose, Confessions of a Virgin Sacrifice

“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

“You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body.”
― Greg X. Graves, Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes

“We human beings regard ourselves as (or compare ourselves to) animals only when it suits us.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I luv the ded, this old baster sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fukin old pervirt I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, an slit his throate; ah asks you whare the fukin Sleeping Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you lyke.”
― Iain Banks, The Bridge

“On the flagship Weight of the Wheel:
“You’d have to ask medical,” said Two Foam.
“Someone ask medical,” said Mahit. “I can’t talk to anyone. I’m not a citizen.” And she smiled, terrifying and far too beautiful with all those teeth exposed, gesturing to her entire lack of cloudhook.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“the veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin”
― Karin Tansek

“The modern man is usually in a hurry to get to a destination from which he will sooner or later suffer from and at times complain about boredom.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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, The Flame Bearer

“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.”
― Andrew Ashling, The Invisible Chains - Part 2: Bonds of Fear

“I found out later than even an education and a cushioned introduction to power cannot make a great leader.”
― Fredrik Nath, Galdir - Protector of Rome

“It was as if all my life had been spent fighting, killing and running. I wanted peace but I knew it was unattainable. I had to return and rule my people...”
― Fredrik Nath, Galdir - Protector of Rome

“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, Tarzan and the Forbidden City

“Revenge of a loving female heart - the most dangerous phenomenon in the universe. You can easily make her a cruel barbarian by carelessly touching that heart.”
― Elmar Hussein

“Consistent inhumanity is the sign of savagery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“What war is ever really won?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Peace ought not be regarded the height of civilization, else like barbarians we forever battle for peace.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Stop whining and rise up - rise against the modern barbarianism - not for yourself, but for your future generations.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Let The Poor Be Your God

“Die Pflicht eines Dämonenjägers ist es zu beenden, was die Zivilisation leichtfertig beginnt.”
― Klotz Van Ziegelstein, Barbarenmond

“For the barbarian, an individual’s humanity is determined entirely by that person’s strict adherence to the cause established by the barbarian. And what the barbarians repeatedly forget is that the cause is humanity.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being; who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal. He is the man who does not know his derivations nor perceive his tendencies, but who merely feels and acts, valuing in his life its force and its filling, but being careless of its purpose and its form. His delight is in abundance and vehemence; his art, like his life, shows an exclusive respect for quantity and splendour of materials. His scorn for what is poorer and weaker than himself is only surpassed by his ignorance of what is higher.”
― George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

“He was not afraid, but slightly bewildered, as a barbarian always is when confronted by the evidence of civilized networks and systems, the workings of which are so baffling and mysterious to him.”
― Robert E. Howard, God in the Bowl

“When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat;
The people scattered gold-dust before my horse's feet;
But now I am a great king, the people hound my track
With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.
—The Road of Kings”
― Robert E Howard