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barbarism quotes

  • You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.

    -John, 1st BaronTweedsmuir Buchan
      The Power-House, ch.3,'Tells of a Midsummer Night'.

  • America is the only country in history that miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.

    - Georges Clemenceau
    Attributed. This has also been attributed to George Bernard Shaw.

  • The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.What a very feware acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

    - Primo Levi
      Other People's Trades,'News from the Sky' (translated by Raymond Rosenthal,1989).

  • The best thing about the violence in Northern Ireland is that it's all so ancient and honorable† The Irish are in the same terrific position as the Shiites in Lebanon, the peasants in El Salvador, the blacks in America, the Jews in Palestine, the Palestinians in Israel (and everybody everywhere, if you read your history)enough barbarism has been visited on the Irish to excuse all barbarities by the Irish barbarians.

    - P(atrick) J(ake) O'Rourke
      Holidays in Hell.

  • When men fail to drive toward a goal or purpose, but only drift, the drift is always towards barbarism.

    - Ronald Wilson Reagan
    Quoted in Edmund Morris Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999).

  • We are fighting in the quarrel of civilization against barbarism, of liberty against tyranny.Germany has become a menace to the whole world. She is the most dangerous enemy of liberty now existing.

    -Theodore Roosevelt
      Speech at Oyster Bay, Long Island, Apr.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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