Every cradle asks us, Whence? and every coffin, Whither? The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed.
I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.
Children are gleeful barbarians.
Books were despised by the Viking Tribes, as they were seen as a horrible civilizing influence and a threat to the barbarian culture.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
Let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now rightfully fight against barbarians.
There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above.
The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.
Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: We are our own Huns.
People who type with their iPhones on loud are barbarians and probably killers.
If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?
What shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.
If you go back to the Conan the Barbarian series, I really liked that.
The Gauls were endowed with all the advantages of art and nature; but as they wanted courage to defend them, they were justly condemned to obey, and even to flatter, the victorious Barbarians, by whose clemency they held their precarious fortunes and their lives.