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Barbarian

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The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices. ~ William Hazlitt

A barbarian is a human who is perceived to be either uncivilized or primitive.

Quotes

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  • Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians… and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me, so that we can move against the barbarians and liberate ourselves from the Persian bondage, for as Greeks we should not be slaves to barbarians.
  • “Demades said that Xerxes fortified the sea with his ships, covered the land with his armies, concealed the sky with his weapons, and filled Persia with Greek prisoners. And now justly the barbarian is praised by Athenians because he took captive Greeks, but Alexander, a Greek, and leading Greeks, did not take captive those arrayed against him.[...]No one of the Greek kings went to Egypt except Alexander alone, and he went, not to make war, but to consult an oracle as to where he should found a city which would forever bear his name.[...]So Alexander was the first of the Greeks to take Egypt, and so became the first both of Greeks and of barbarians.”
  • Civilisation is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The boundary between 'us' and 'them' may be an internal one (for much of world history the idea of a 'civilised woman' has been a contradiction in terms), or an external one, as the word 'barbarian' suggests; it was originally a derogatory and ethnocentric ancient Greek term for foreigners you could not understand, because they spoke in an incomprehensible babble: 'bar-bar-bar ...' The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called 'barbarians' may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.
    • Mary Beard, Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith. Profile Books, 2018.
  • The Barbarian hopes — and that is the very mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
  • In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.
    We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.
    We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.
    • Hilaire Belloc. This and That and the Other (1912), Ch. XXXII : The Barbarians , p. 282
  • Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
    (How serious people's faces have become.)
    Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
    everyone going home lost in thought?
    Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
    And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
    there are no barbarians any longer.
    Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
    Those people were a kind of solution.
  • Some of the men muttered and looked at the youth in awe-struck ways...It was revealed to him that he had been a barbarian, a beast. He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion.
    • Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter 12 (1895). Quoted in Swainson, Bill, Encarta Book of Quotations. Bloomsbury, London, 2000 (pg. 239).
  • Irish Insular art and the British schools it inspired is one of the great artistic achievements of barbarian Europe comparable to La Tène art – its immediate predecessor in the west.
    • Barry Cunliffe, The Celts: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • The Athenians of the fifth century [BC] are not exemplars of morality; the progress of the intellect has loosened many of them from their ethical traditions, and has turned them into almost unmoral individuals. They have a high reputation for legal justice, but they are seldom altruistic to any but their children; conscience rarely troubles them, and they never dream of loving their neighbors as themselves. Manners vary from class to class; in the dialogues of Plato life is graced with a charming courtesy, but in the comedies of Aristophanes there are no manners at all, and in public oratory personal abuse is relied upon as the very soul of eloquence; in such matters the Greeks have much to learn from the time-polished “barbarians” of Egypt or Persia or Babylon.
  • We must not forget, therefore, to include the influence of civilization among the determinants of neuroses. It is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy: for a civilized man the task is a hard one.
    • Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, New York, W.W. Norton. 1949
  • Attila the Hun remains to this day a byword for savagery and destruction. His is one of the few names from antiquity that still prompt instant recognition, putting him alongside the likes of Alexander, Caesar, Cleopatra and Nero. Attila has become the barbarian of the ancient world.
    • Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower (2009) pt. 3, ch. 17
  • You say the attractions of a barbaric life could not exist without the perspective of civilization. Yet (if we call the Vikings barbarians) do you not think that they found their life good without that perspective? The sagas hum with self-glorification, with praise of the "whale path", and the glory of the foray. Dull, mindless clods, mere hunks of inert matter? I cannot agree there. Such men as Eric the Red, Leif the Lucky, Hrolf the Ganger, Hengist - they could not have been feeble jelly-like organisms groping blindly through the scum of primordial night. They were alive; they stung, they burned, they tingled with Life - life raw and crude and violent doubtless; but life, just the same, and worthy to be classified with the best effort of the intellectual side of man.
    • Robert E. Howard, letter to H. P. Lovecraft (March 6, 1933). Quoted in A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard eds. S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke; Hippocampus Press, 2017, (pp. 547-48)
  • The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
    • William Hazlitt, in Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)
  • Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.
  • Nations are barbarian in their infancy but not savage. The barbarian is a proportional mean between the savage and the citizen. He already possesses no end of knowledge: he has habitations, some agriculture, domestic animals, laws, a cult, regular tribunals; he lacks only the sciences.
  • We have said "Buy this or - take a bayonet in your belly!" People don't want the goods we offer them, but they are poor and have to buy something which [will] serve their turn anyhow, so they accept...their own goods made slowly and at greater cost are driven out of the market, and the metamorphosis begins which ends in turning fairly happy barbarians into very miserable half-civilized people surrounded by a fringe of exploiters and middle-men varied in nation but of one religion "Take care of number one".
    • William Morris, "The Depression of Trade", Speech at the Large Hall, Cucumber Gardens, Royton, Manchester, 12th July 1885. Quoted in E. P. Thompson, William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary, New York, Pantheon Books, 1976 (p. 38).
  • Simple-minded barbarians met advanced, scholarly empire; barbarians sacked empire for shiny things.
  • Since barbarism has its pleasures, it naturally has its apologists.
  • Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
    • Leonard Woolf, Barbarians at the Gate (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939), p. 83

See also

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