barbarism

The language of sword is less powerful than the language of word, but most ofthe people understand the language of sword with greater power than thelanguage of word.

War is at its best barbarism.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.

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.

Barbarians are all alike... sit up half the night to discuss anything a Roman says.

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

In India there__ no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man__ face and you__l find an old man__ mind.

The human race is a letdown, Ernest _ a bad, bad letdown. And I__ disgusted with it. It thinks it__ progressed, but it hasn__. It thinks it__ risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn__. It__ wallowing in it. It__ still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We__e invented a few things that make noises, but we haven__ invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions.

So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.

Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory. It is the companion that dogs our every step.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris- ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of par- ents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have termi- nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat- ters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously some- times of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?

Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.

Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most __avage_ or __arbarous_ of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.