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Barbarian Quotes

Browse 28 quotes about Barbarian.

Barbarian Quotes

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

PeopleHumansPersonsHumorFunnyReligionHumanityHuman BeingsAnimalHumourCivilizationCreaturesHumanJokesSpeciesIgnorantCompareHuman RaceSatireCivilizedAnimalsAphorismPrimitiveJokeVulgarConvenienceConvenientAphorismsHomo SapiensWildBarbarismHeathenBarbaricAphoristAphoristsCreatureUncivilizedAnthropocentrismSavageSuitBarbarianExpedienceNeanderthalCivilizeAnthropocentricBarbarousExpedientBrutishCompare ToLikenLiken ToUncultivated
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“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.”

ArtReasonPoetryEmotionsBarbarian
Book:Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
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“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.”

WorldLifeCountryLawPeaceVirtueGreekLiveAdvancementOathMortalBarbarianArbitratorAlexander S Oath
Author:Alexander the Great
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“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…”

PurposeCulturePeaceJusticeSeaIndiaMemoryConquestGreeceDionysusMacedoniaBarbarianHerculesPerseusDiogenesCivilizeHellenic
Author:Alexander the Great
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“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.”

CultureAnthropologyBarbarismCultural DifferencesSavagerySavageBarbarianCultural RelativismEthnocentrism
Book:Race et histoire
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“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.”

IgnoranceCivilization21st Century20th CenturyVulgarTwentieth CenturyBarbarismVulgarityBarbaricBarbarianIconoclastVandal
Author:Peter Sloterdijk
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