These Barbarian quotes will inspire you. A barbarian is a human who is perceived to be either uncivilized or primitive.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging Barbarian quotes, Barbarian sayings, and Barbarian proverbs.
Best Barbarian Quotes
- “Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.” ~ Leonard Woolf
- “War is the business of barbarians.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “What shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” ~ C.P. Cavafy
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“I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.” ~ J. M. Coetzee
- “Homosexuality is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love – all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce.” ~ Plato
- “The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.” ~ William Gilmore Simms
- “If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.” ~ Thomas Sowell
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“The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.” ~ J. M. Coetzee
- “Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.” ~ Isaiah Berlin
- “But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.” ~ Karl Marx
- “We are standing face to face with the barbarians. The enemy is no longer outside but inside the City, and the ruling ideology, paralysed, is incapable of spotting him. It stammers, overcome by its own moral disarmament, and is giving up: this is the time to seize the reins. Present society is an accomplice to the evil that is devouring it.” ~ Guillaume Faye
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“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today.” ~ C.P. Cavafy
- “Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.” ~ Pierre Schaeffer
- “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.” ~ George Santayana
- “Here in Canada, in the Western world, we are inside the walls. Outside the walls are the barbarians.” ~ Barbara Amiel
- “The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to US power for the sake of America’s interests.” ~ Breyten Breytenbach
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“As a result, I’ve been portrayed as a cynical barbarian preying on the very clients I was charged to defend.” ~ Jack Abramoff
- “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.” ~ J. M. Coetzee
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“The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.” ~ Sinclair Lewis
- “If there were a clear prospect that such evils were part of a barbarian past, then at least we might find a small crumb of comfort. No such prospect exists: no scientific analysis can even remotely answer or account for past and present horrors of human behaviour.” ~ Simon Conway Morris
- “If you go back to the Conan the Barbarian series, I really liked that.” ~ Andre Braugher
- “No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money” ~ Samuel Gompers
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“Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
- “It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming.” ~ Garrison Keillor
- “If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?” ~ Angela Carter
- “Of course the barbarians’ aim of world domination has not escaped the attention of the Europeans, perhaps because unlike us they are closer to the walls.” ~ Barbara Amiel
- “Wine’s terrible for babies.” Dorian swept into the sitting room to join me, elegantly arranging himself on a love seat that displayed his purple velvet robes to best effect. “Well of course it is. I’d never dream of giving wine to an infant! What do you take me for, a barbarian? But for you… well, it might go a long way to make you a little less jumpy. You’ve been positively unbearable to live around. “I can’t have it either. It affects the babies in utero.” ~ Richelle Mead
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“Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.” ~ William Ralph Inge
- “The barbarians come out at night.” ~ J. M. Coetzee
- “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.” ~ Barbara Tuchman
- “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” ~ Robert E. Howard
- “No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and the ungodly.” ~ Richard Hakluyt
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“People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.” ~ George Lucas
- “Your insult has offended me. If we were at the Peaks, we would have to duel in traditional alil’tiki’i fashion.” “Which is what?” Teft asked. “With spears?” Rock laughed. “No, no. We upon the Peaks are not barbarians like you down here.” “How then?” Kaladin asked, genuinely curious. “Well,” Rock said, “is involving much mudbeer and singing.” “How’s that a duel?” “He who can still sing after the most drinks is winner. Plus, soon’ everyone is so drunk that they forget what argument was about.” Teft laughed. “Beats knives at dawn, I suppose.” ~ Brandon Sanderson
- “Anyone can admire creation. Only a barbarian sees the beauty in demolition.” ~ Kamahl
- “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.” ~ John Stuart Mill
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“I didn’t know how to be any other way. I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire.” ~ Mike Tyson
- “If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour.” ~ Edward Gibbon
- “How dangerous it is rashly to adopt the Mosaical institutions [Old Testament teachings of eye for an eye]. Laws might have been proper for a tribe of ardent barbarians wandering through the sands of Arabia which are wholly unfit for an enlightened people of civilized and gentle manners.” ~ Gerald Heaney
- “The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.” ~ John Shelby Spong
- “…while science gives us implements to use, science alone does not determine for what ends they will be employed. Radio is an amazing invention. Yet now that it is here, one suspects that Hitler never could have consolidated his totalitarian control over Germany without its use. One never can tell what hands will reach out to lay hold on scientific gifts, or to what employment they will be put. Ever the old barbarian emerges, destructively using the new civilization.” ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
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“This is good, life must continue, we are fighting barbarians, but we must remain human.” ~ David Benioff
- “You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933… Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.” ~ Charles Krauthammer
- “Be sincere and true to your word, serious and careful in your actions; and you will get along even among barbarians, But if you are not sincere and untrustworthy in your speech, frivolous and careless in your actions, how will you get along even among your own neighbors? When stand, see these principles in front of you; in your carriage see them on the yoke. Then you may be sure to get along.” ~ Confucius
- “It’s a curious thing, this thing we call civilization…we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It’s really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian…All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.” ~ William Dean Howells
- “To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski
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“Basque and Celt. Criminals and barbarians. I didn’t think there could be a more primitive pairing of genes.” ~ Karen Marie Moning
- “Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.” ~ Henry George
- “There is no god, there is no god, there is no god at all. He who invented god is a fool. He who propagates god is a scoundrel. He who worships god is a barbarian.” ~ Periyar E. V. Ramasamy
- “The Greeks had had vast experience in this world, their imagination had been fertile and they had created much…that, in these circumstances, they should fall in with a people imbued with a calm and sometimes stolid and bucolic certainty where its spiritual possessions were concerned, barbarians with no sculpture or breeding, necessarily tinged their contempt with impotent wrath. The inevitably logical result of this attitude on the part of the Greeks was the growth of anti-Semitism, of hatred of the Jews.” ~ Joseph Kastein
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“There, close enough to spit on–if I’d been a barbarian and inclined to spit–was the dragon.” ~ Vivian Vande Velde
- “The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can’t be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why – they’ve been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don’t give a damn.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “There’s no god. He who created god was a fool; he who spreads his name is a scoundrel and he who worships him is a barbarian.” ~ Periyar E. V. Ramasamy
- “Barbarian –A Code of Conduct honored by all true barbarian warriors, requiring excellent coordination with weapons, closeness to nature, awkwardness with women, common sense, and completion of the mission.” ~ Piers Anthony
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“[O]ne person’s ‘barbarian’ is another person’s ‘just doing what everybody else is doing.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “Why is she afraid?” he asked. “She’s not Anjin-san. Just a little nervous. Please excuse her. She’s never seen a foreigner close to before.” “Tell her when the moon’s full, barbarians sprout horns and fire comes out of our mouths like dragons.” ~ James Clavell
- “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.” ~ Edward Gibbon
- “Barbarian that I am, I had eaten all of it. It had tasted quite nice too. Still, I took note of this fact and resigned myself to throw away half of a perfectly good cheese if it was set in front of me. Such is the price of civilization.” ~ Patrick Rothfuss
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“They’d poisoned me, dammit. Probably to trade my dead body to the barbarians for Wulfgar’s safe return. Or maybe just for the fun of it.” ~ Vivian Vande Velde
- “The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it – because it is a fact.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “I ate him,” said the homunculus, biting into his sausage. The kids couldn’t hide their looks of horror. He smiled, sausage juice running down his chin. “Oh, don’t worry – I cooked him first. I’m not a barbarian.” ~ Pseudonymous Bosch
- “The Clave thinks the wards will stand forever because they’ve stood for a thousand years. But so did Rome, till the barbarians came. Everything falls someday” ~ Cassandra Clare
