#barbarism

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#barbarism #between #civilization #country #decadence

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

Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism. ↗

— Bill Kristol

#barbarism #civilization #defense #indispensable #patriotism

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

The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before. ↗

— Ron Silver

#barbarism #before #century #exhibited #human

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos. ↗

— Edward Bellamy

#chaos #civilization #imagination

Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama. ↗

— George P. Baker

#ages #back #barbarism #civilization #drama

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization. ↗

— John O'Hara

#barbarism #being #civilization #country #decadence

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology. ↗

— Clifford D. Simak

#based #civilization #continue #found #mankind

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