Barbarian

"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."

"Since barbarism has its pleasures, it naturally has its apologists."

"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."

"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."

"Simple-minded barbarians met advanced, scholarly empire; barbarians sacked empire for shiny things."

"We have said "Buy this or - take a bayonet in your belly!" People dont 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"."

"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."

"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 persons barbarity is another persons civilisation."

"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."

"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."