#barbarism

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism. ↗

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

#attain #barbarism #greeks #hardly #human

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#broke #german #hitler #hysterical #into

War is at its best barbarism. ↗

— William Tecumseh Sherman

#best #war

All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order. ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#cleanliness #come #courtesy #downward #excluded

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #denunciation #evil #good #jews

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. ↗

— Georges Clemenceau

#barbarism #civilization #degeneration #directly #gone

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph ↗

— Robert E. Howard

#civilization #nature

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn. ↗

— John Buchan

#barbarism #bring #civilization #division #earth

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances. ↗

— Simone Weil

#barbarism #becomes #characteristic #circumstances #considered

To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism. ↗

— Elihu Root

#begin #causes #civilization #deal #extent