the Barbarian QUOTES

1 " The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles. "

― Hilaire Belloc

2 " 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 “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism. "

― Claude Lévi-Strauss , Race et histoire

3 " You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body. "

― Greg X. Graves , Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes

4 " Afterwards, over drinks, one of the barbarians asked me what I dreamt of. I, of course, was taken aback. They say barbarians don't dream. But I told him... " I dream of tangible nothing," I said." So you mean nothing as something, then?" the barbarian replied over the rim of his gin-and-tonic." I mean unity, dissolving into non-self," I said, just to be confusing. "