"Barbarism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all. I believe the Baptistery is the most restful place in Florence; and this is rather odd considering that it is all marble and mosaic patterns. But its shape is very soothing, and age has given it a quality of its own, and there is just that touch of barbarism about it such as one gets in Byzantine buildings to lend it a peculiar ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... morality which Buddha preached for the first time to all classes of men, and look into the dark pages of his code of religious metaphysics, we can hardly find another explanation. Fortunately, the millions who embraced the doctrines of Buddha, and were saved by it from the depths of barbarism, brutality, and selfishness, were unable to fathom the meaning of his metaphysical doctrines. With them the Nirvana to which they aspired, became only a relative deliverance from the miseries of human life; nay, it took the bright colours of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... necessity of preserving a register of passing seasons and years would soon be felt, and the practice of recording important transactions must have grown up as a necessary consequence of social life. But of these deliberate early records a very small portion only has escaped the ravages of time and barbarism. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Africa. The progress of these discoveries being stopped by the Senate of Carthage, those who happened to be in the newly discovered countries, cut off from all communication with their countrymen, and being destitute of many of the necessaries of life, easily fell into a state of barbarism. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... soldiers now in Pennsylvania remember such acts of cruelty and barbarism? Will not the Nansemond companies remember it? And will not that gallant boy in the 16th Regiment remember his mother's fate, and take vengeance on the enemy? Will not such a cruel race of people eventually reap the fruit of their doings? God ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... stand up in a barbaric market place whilst his tongue was torn from him. Sometimes the Turks or the piebald governments of the state sent down a few gendarmes and tried a sort of sporadic administration of the country. It usually ended in the representative of the law lapsing into barbarism, or else disappearing from the face of the earth, with a whole community of murderers eager to testify, with singular unanimity, to the fact that he had either committed suicide or had gone off with the wife of one of ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... restraints. They were let loose upon the Whites, their masters, with all the vices of slavery upon them. What was to have been expected but the dissolution of all civilized society, with the reign of barbarism and terror? Now all I ask for with respect to the slaves in our own islands is, that they should be emancipated by degrees, or that they should be made to pass through a certain course of discipline, as through a preparatory school, to fit them for the right ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... whether by his own hand or by that of an accomplice, not only injures his victim, but injures himself. He stifles what nobleness of character he may have and he cultivates depravity and barbarism. He destroys in himself the spirit of true religion and isolates himself from those whose lives are made beautiful by sympathy. No one need hope for a spiritual Heaven while helping to make the earth a bloody Hell. No one who asks others to do wrong for him need imagine he escapes ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... years given us, from which to calculate out the course to be described by our descendants; but that arc is so tiny when compared to the vast ages which Providence uses in working out its designs that our deductions from it must, I think, be uncertain. Will civilisation be swamped by barbarism? It happened once before, because the civilised were tiny specks of light in the midst of darkness. But what, for example, could break down the great country in which you dwell? No, our civilisation ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... and yet, there is the influence. That is a trick of my old Puritan training, of course, but after all it is right to consider. One must count influence as a factor if one believes in civilization, and I do believe in civilization; certainly, I would not go back to barbarism. But is a woman to be tied down—oh! how a woman is always tied down! Limitation —limitation—limitation; that is the whole story of a woman's life; and the harder she struggles to get away from her bonds the more she proves to herself ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... coast had arrayed against it this vast line of northern and western forts, and the Indians, who were mostly friendly with the French, united with them in several instances and showed them some new styles of barbarism which up to that time they had never ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... Oxford correctness on this point. He thanked the porter for putting his luggage up called me "Sir" till he found I was an Oxford man; and had we travelled for a month together, would rather have requested the coachman to introduce us, than be guilty of any such barbarism as to introduce himself. So by degrees our intimacy, instead of warming, waxed cold. As night drew on, and the fire of cigars from Branling, self, and coachman, became more deadly, the fur cap was drawn still closer ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... struck by the insistence with which the Germans represent their cause in this worldwide struggle as the cause of civilization as opposed to Muscovite barbarism; and I am not sure that some of my English friends do not feel reluctant to side with the subjects of the Czar against the countrymen of Harnack and Eucken. One would like to know, however, since when did the Germans take up this attitude? They were not so squeamish during the "war of emancipation," ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... the grotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example, A Luve Ron (A Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... corrupted, both in the pronunciation and otherwise, by the barbarism of my country. I never saw a man who was a native of any of the provinces on this side of the kingdom who had not a twang of his place of birth, and that was not offensive to ears that were purely French. And yet it is not that I am so perfect ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... The next moment she was before the roofless walls, and then stopped, stiffened like the lizard. For out of that peaceful ruin which had once held the wild and untamed vagabonds of earth and sky, arose a type of savagery and barbarism the child had never before looked upon,—the head and shoulders ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... be found in various books—among others in Wells's Canadiana, p. 164, and Roger's Rise of Canada from Barbarism to Civilization, Vol. I., p. 405—that Mr. Mackenzie's mother was grossly maltreated by the rioters is wholly without foundation. The affair was disgraceful enough, in all conscience, and ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... to the 12th centuries of the christian era has been classed by historians as the "Dark Ages" of the world, because of the general prevalence in Europe of ignorance, superstition and barbarism. Some of the leading events that occurred during this gloomy period, immediately following the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, tended almost wholly to check the spread of intelligence and the prosperity of the ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Great and Only One. 'In the days of old, when the Peruvians were but a few scattered tribes plunged in the depths of ignorance and barbarism, I took pity upon them and sent to them Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, two of my children, to gather together those scattered tribes and form them into communities, to instruct them in the mysteries of my worship, and to teach them the arts whereby ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... can speak but little good of him [her dead husband] she speaks but little of him. So handsomely folding up her discourse, that his virtues are shown outwards, and his vices wrapt up in silence; as counting it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory, who hath mould cast on ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... on this heading, the civilisation of Baghdad contrasting with the barbarism of Europe then Germanic, The Nights itself being the best expositor. On the other hand the action of the state-religion upon the state, the condition of Al- Islam during the reign of Al-Rashid, its declension from the primitive creed and its relation to Christianity ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... fine and original conception of character, he mentions his 'desire of preserving a nearer approach to unity, than the irregularity which is the reproach of the English theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of form, and of the barbarism to which our English genius is prone, from Goody Blake and Harry Gill up to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces even plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral proof of the sanity and balance which marked the foundations of his character, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... States only, whether the Sandwich Islands, with their geographical and military importance, unrivalled by that of any other position in the North Pacific, shall in the future be an outpost of European civilization, or of the comparative barbarism of China. It is sufficiently known, but not, perhaps, generally noted in our country, that many military men abroad, familiar with Eastern conditions and character, look with apprehension toward the day when the vast mass of China—now inert—may yield to one of those impulses ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever assumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To us the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... broken alive on the wheel was one of the most horrible of tortures, a bequest from ages of violence and barbarism. It was preserved in France mainly for the punishment of Protestants. The prisoner was extended on a St. Andrew's cross, with eight notches cut on it—one below each arm between the elbow and wrist, another between each elbow and the shoulders, one under each thigh, and one ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... of spirit, with a steady perseverance in the pursuit of the sublimest of human professions. He has travelled on heedless of the sneers, the ridicule, or the detraction of his enemies, and he has arrived at that point where the lustre of his works will not fail to illuminate the dark regions of barbarism and distaste long after their bright author ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... though differing but little from the simplicity found in rude states of society, presented a feature peculiar among a people not far advanced in civilization, which served greatly to promote elevation of mind, and advance them far above a condition of barbarism. They were in the habit of meeting in public assemblies, to discuss those questions that pertained to the interests, or destiny of their nation. Around their council fires their chiefs and warriors gathered, ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... Parthian kingdom, but not powerful enough to be a rival,—certainly not in an aggressive contest. But northward and northeast of the Roman boundaries, there stretched "a vague and unexplored waste of barbarism," "a vast, dimly-known chaos of numberless barbarous tongues and savage races." A commotion among these numerous tribes, the uncounted multitudes spreading far into the plain of Central Asia, had begun as early as the days of Julius Caesar. They were made up of three ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... none of your cold baths for such a machine as yours. If you have no convenience for a warm bath in the house, set a mason to work to-morrow and make one in each of your country houses. It is a high evidence of the barbarism of our Southern states that, in an extent of three hundred miles, filled with wealthy people, and in a hot climate, there should not be, in any one private family, a convenient bathing-room. Perhaps, indeed, some ruined French refugee may have expended fifty dollars to ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Council who might have to attend meetings at seven in the morning. He accordingly migrated to Charing Cross, now become again Charing without the cross, this work of art having been an early (1647) victim of religious barbarism. In November he was accommodated with chambers in Whitehall. But from these he was soon ousted by claimants more considerable or more importunate, and in 1651 he removed to "a pretty garden-house" in Petty France, in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... place, we have no reliable statistical basis for a positive statement, either one way or another. Our ignorance of the precise prevalence of disease in savagery, in barbarism, and even under civilization up to fifty years ago, is absolute and profound. It is only since 1840 that vital statistics of any value, except as to gross deaths and births, began to be kept. So far as we are able to judge from our study of savage ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... fall, or by whom. But the Pope must not return to Rome. Rome must be mine. The city of a new empire, the conquest of a new Attila! There, every circumstance combines in my favour!—the absence of the Pope, the weakness of the middle class, the poverty of the populace, the imbecile though ferocious barbarism of the Barons, have long concurred to render Rome the most facile, while the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wife in the presence of his servants. And the matter is in nowise minced, but described with an unblushing zest which makes the impression of naivete. It is obvious that in his delight in the exhibition of a healthy, primitive wrath, Bjoernson half forgets how such barbarism must affect his readers. We hear, to be sure, that the servants were filled with indignation and horror, and that Harold Kaas, having expected laughter and applause, "went away a defeated and irremediably crushed man." But for all that the incident is ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... learn the same things, in a hundred varied forms. Imagine this vast, vast throng of boys of a hundred races, this immense movement of which you form a part, and think, if this movement were to cease, humanity would fall back into barbarism; this movement is the progress, the hope, the glory of the world. Courage, then, little soldier of the immense army. Your books are your arms, your class is your squadron, the field of battle is the whole ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... certain interest. "There are, then," I said to myself, "people that are neither over-civilized nor steeped in ignorance. There are those that can do something and thus form the intermediate, healthy link between decay and barbarism." It is possible that this social strata mostly exists in bigger towns, where it is continually recruited by the influx of the sons of bankrupt noblemen, who adapt themselves to burgher traditions of work, and bring to it strong ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... refusal of the Irish to fall in with the rapid torrent of European thought and progress, as it is called, is the strangest phenomenon in their history, and gives them at first an outlandish look, which many have not hesitated to call barbarism. We hope thoroughly to vindicate their character from such a foul aspersion, and to show this phenomenon as the secret cause of their final success, which is now all but secured; and this feature alone of their national life adds to their character ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... these remote parts of the world, even if they should be but stepping-stones to those who were to follow them." Finding these barbarous tribes here, the Pilgrim Fathers bartered with them for peaceable possession, which they did not always secure. As civilization encroached upon barbarism, the colonists kept their homes often only by the defences of war. But peace was in the hearts and purposes of the ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... of England is hoisted at the stern of the Doctor's canoe; the flag of America waves and rustles joyously above mine; and I cannot look at them without feeling a certain pride that the two Anglo-Saxon nations are represented this day on this great inland sea, in the face of wild nature and barbarism. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... much length, did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend mass. For one of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men were hanged. "The truth is," says Lecky, "that the crime was merely the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."* These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic as ever. Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a civilised community, does not hint that they ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... I have been?" Well, it does seem like rather a shady transaction for me to have been mixed up in. The side of it that impresses me, however, is the lapse of time as measured in conditions and institutions. That was barbarism; and it was Iowa! And it was in my lifetime. It was in a region now as completely developed as England, and it goes back to things as raw and primitive as King Arthur's time. I wonder if his knights were not in the main, pretty shabby rascals, as bad as Dick McGill—or Cow Vandemark? But Gertrude ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... moaning, during which time he pretends to receive instructions how to cure the malady. The Wesleyan missionaries especially have laboured indefatigably among these wretched beings, and notwithstanding the low state of barbarism into which they had sunk, have succeeded in converting many hundreds to a knowledge of the glorious truths of Christianity, and in bringing them within the pale of civilisation. They are settled in villages, cultivate the ground, and have schools among them. One or two stations, in ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... times. The exterior is one of the most tasteless jumbles of all styles and ages of art that can be imagined; and a portion of it is covered with brick. But I question if there be not parts much older than the cathedral. The interior compensates somewhat for the barbarism of the outside. It is large and commodious, but sadly altered from its original construction; and has recently been trimmed up and smartened in the true church-warden style. The great boast of this church is its MONUMENTS; which, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... him to take away the body of Hector. The ferocious Carthaginians were softened through the influence of this God of peace, and received the Trojans in friendship. Mercury it was who gathered men into society and substituted social customs for barbarism. He invented the lyre and was the master of Amphion, who opened the walls of Thebes by the charm of his singing. Mercury or Hermes gave the first man knowledge; but it was enveloped in a mysterious veil which it was never permitted the profane to penetrate, which signifies that all that he learned ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... mummery from the days of darkness and barbarism," continued Dulberry. "And hence it comes that sound principles make so little progress in Wales. As if we hadn't red-letter days in the calendar more than enough already from national and general superstition, ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... that they must be restored a second time. However it may mortify our vanity, we must be forced to allow them our masters; and we may venture to prophecy, that when they shall cease to be studied, arts will no longer flourish, and we shall again relapse into barbarism. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... never has been a revolution,[55] properly so called; there never has even been one grand national rebellion. The people, tho often lawless, are never free. Among them we find still preserved that peculiar taint of barbarism which makes men prefer occasional disobedience to systematic liberty. Certain feelings there are of our common nature, which even their slavish loyalty can not eradicate, and which, from time to time, urge them to resist injustice. Such instincts are happily the inalienable lot of humanity, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... from Shanghai to Valparaiso will ever look at a German signature again. This doctrine of the scrap of paper, this doctrine which is superscribed by Bernhardi, that treaties only bind a nation as long as it is to its interest, goes to the root of public law. It is the straight road to barbarism, just as if you removed the magnetic pole whenever it was in the way of a German cruiser, the whole navigation of the seas would become dangerous, difficult, impossible, and the whole machinery of civilization will break down if this ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... the journey, determined where and how long they should halt, and decided on the route next to be taken; the other showing a real or affected indifference on all these matters, and making of his town-bred apathy a very serviceable quality in the midst of Irish barbarism and desolation. On politics, too—if that be the name for such light convictions as they entertained—they differed: the soldier's ideas being formed on what he fancied would be the late Duke of Wellington's opinion, and consisted in what he called 'putting ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... father, glorious in the perfection of physical manhood, out on the field of carnage to be slain in an effort to settle international difficulty or to uphold fancied national honor, is unquestionable barbarism. It is far more humane to terminate disputed questions by arbitration than by the keen-edged sword. International peace compacts can hold mankind together by unbreakable yet unburdensome bonds ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... theological verse, had the same effect in philosophico-theological prose. Latin is before all things a precise language, and the one qualification which it lacked in classical times for philosophic use, the presence of a full and exact terminology, was supplied in the Middle Ages by the fearless barbarism (as pedants call it) which made it possible and easy first to fashion such words as aseitas and quodlibetalis, and then, after, as it were, lodging a specification of their meaning, to use them ever afterwards as current coin. All ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... there never can be. No record seems to be kept, except in the unfaithful memories of the natives; and even if the contrary were the case, posterity would willingly consign to oblivion all but the salient points of this period of barbarism and slave-hunting. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... remarkable; it was intersected by blue seams, as if nature had supplied them with a shirt of her own formation—for not the slightest appearance of muslin or cambric was visible. The name of this horde of barbarism is, as we were afterwards informed, in their native patois, Scullers, and from the circumstance of their appearing peculiar to the river and its banks, the Professor of Natural History, whom we carried with us, after an elaborate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... Roman history, but was a very considerable province, equal to the whole Austrian empire in our times, and was as completely reclaimed from barbarism as Gaul or Spain. Both Jerome and Diocletian were born in a little ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... there is no one to say, What doest thou? to the gratification of the baser appetites in their various forms, must be too great for ordinary and unaided human virtue. The tendency of such a system must ever be, not to progressive self refinement and moral culture, but to barbarism. We should expect to find in connection with such a civil polity, a state of society, of religion and morals somewhat peculiar—acts of violence and barbarity not infrequent, the street affray, the duel, the murderous assault, the unrestrained indulgence of the animal ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... great mistake in making you what you are, if there is no place for you to exercise your powers in but this present world, and nothing to exercise them on except the things that pass and perish. Travellers in lands where civilisation used to be, and barbarism now is, find sculptured stones from temples turned into fences for cattle-sheds and walls round pigstyes. And that is something like what men do with the faculties that God has given them. Why, the best part of you, brother, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... What food remained was placed in the charge of another woman until it was required by the matron. In this connection Mr. Morgan says: "This plan of life shows that their domestic economy was not without method, and it displays the care and management of women, low down in barbarism, for husbanding their resources and for improving ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... happens, however, that powerful ape and baboon colonies relapse into barbarism, and roam, plunder, rob and murder, like a pack of uncivilised wolves or hyenas. They seem all at once to forget their peaceful industries and lose all desire for clean and right living. And strangely enough, when they once turn bad, they seldom reform. ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Roman Empire fell civilization in western Europe was not on a high plane; indeed, the feudalism that followed was not much above barbarism. The people were living in a manner that was not very much unlike the communal system under which the serfs of Russia lived only a few years ago. Each centre of population was a sort of military camp governed by a feudal ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... people with race peculiarities: but it seems to me that it is very useless to ask whether we are training an inferior stock. There was a time when the Anglo-Saxon stock was far inferior {96} to its present condition. We ourselves are not enough removed from heathenism and barbarism to become very pharisaical. ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... why the authorities tolerate such culpable industries. Such unfortunates should be locked up and forced to work. Progress, my word! creeps at a snail's pace. We are floundering about in mere barbarism." ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... only the beginning of attempts at accommodation. The threat of tariff war had called forth in the United States loud protests against any such reversion to economic barbarism. President Taft realized that he had antagonized the growing low-tariff sentiment of the country by his support of the Payne-Aldrich tariff and was eager to set himself right. A week before the March negotiations were concluded, a Democratic candidate had carried a strongly ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... read the letter, was surprised at the naivete it showed, and at Avice and her mother's antiquated simplicity in supposing that to be still a grave and operating principle which was a bygone barbarism to himself and other absentees from the island. His father, as a money-maker, might have practical wishes on the matter of descendants which lent plausibility to the conjecture of Avice and her mother; but to Jocelyn he had never expressed himself in favour of the ancient ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... light of legend, tradition and written history. But the general features are intelligible in all, and the revelation which they make is identical. They show the human mind, under like external conditions and with like internal conceptions, advancing on the same line from barbarism to culture; they show a struggle and rivalry of races and tribes, in which one or another shoots forward for a time, and is then outstripped or pushed aside; they show a gradual sifting, blending and consolidation, in which primitive and fortuitous forms of association are superseded ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... counties, and counties into the dimensions of an average farm, as to the time taken to traverse them—when spaces are thus brought into the closest union, it is but the counterpart and prophecy of the close moral and industrial union of the people who inhabit the spaces. When slavery, that relic of barbarism, that demon of darkness and discord, is destroyed, we can conceive of nothing that shall possess like power to sunder one section of the Union from another—of nothing that shall not be within the power of the people to settle by rational discussion or amicable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was similarly furnished with covered roads, which enabled the priests of Bel to communicate with one another, and with the royal palace, in a city three days' journey in length and three in breadth. Civilization and barbarism, indeed, in this respect met each another, and the caves of the Troglodyte AEthiopians on the western shore of the Red Sea were connected by numerous vaulted passages cut in the solid limestone, along which the droves of cattle ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... Ainley, promptly, with a sudden flash of the eyes. "I am with you there, Miss Yardely, but romance does not lie in mere barbarism, for most men it is incarnated ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species. [Footnote: —-"And it may be remarked that, as the world has passed through these several stages of strife to produce a Christendom, so by relaxing in ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... palace, with whom, however, the material was of the best as well as gayest—for they were all gorgeously clad in blue and scarlet cloth; and velvet, with gold and silver lace, embroidery, feathers, etcetera,—but what nation, even in the so-called civilised world, is free from barbarism ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... is too late to protest—since I am upon words—against a current barbarism which is at least ten years old, and against which I have publicly cried out at least twenty times. For the twenty-first time, then, let me object to "wage" for "wages." Is the wages of sin death, or are they? Do you give a man an ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... cruelty and brutal lust in rude, rough times, acts of superstition dark and dreadful, utterances which to us are blasphemous ascribed to the Eternal and Holy One? Such faults are inevitable in the literature that records a nation's growth from barbarism. Were a man in the name of Liberty or in the name of Truth to hunt through Homer, to rake together all the errors and superstitions embalmed in these immortal sagas, to haul up from the obscurity where sensible people leave them the lewdnesses suggested ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... much exacerbated the feelings of the peasantry, who, for the most part, regarded its commencement with indifference. The perpetual marches and counter-marches of the armies, the assaults and burnings of towns and villages, the fierce demeanour of the justly embittered Prussians, and the native barbarism of the Russians, had spread devastation and horror through some of the fairest provinces of France. The desolation was such that wolves and other beasts of prey appeared, in numbers which recalled the ages of the unbroken forest, amidst the vineyards and gardens of ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... "The Child in Folk-Thought,"—what tribe upon tribe, age after age, has thought about, ascribed to, dreamt of, learned from, taught to, the child, the parent-lore of the human race, in its development through savagery and barbarism to civilization and culture,—can bring to the harvest of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... I had relied on for protection: distance I had relied on, and suddenly I was found in close neighborhood to my most formidable enemy. Poverty I had rolled on, and that was not denied: he granted the poverty, but it was dependent on the barbarism of the Gombroonians. It seems that in the central forests of Gombroonia there were diamond mines, which my people, from their low condition of civilization, did not value, nor had any means of working. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... has been looking at it, since scientific methods came in, through Teutonic (including Anglo-Saxon) or Latin eyes; and seen very little indeed but confusion. Britain like the rest of the western empire, suffered the incursions of northern barbarism; but unlike most of the rest, it fought, and not as a piece of Rome, but as Celtic Britain;—fought, and would not compromise nor understand that it was defeated. It took eight centuries of war, and the loss of all ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... traditional bitterness in his mind. To secure the prize for which he was fighting he had only two courses open: either to restore Poland as the frontier state between the civilization of his empire and the semi-barbarism and ambitions of Russia, or else to negotiate ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... know that, notwithstanding our high state of civilization, we yet maintain in practice two of the most loathsome relics of barbarism-we lash helpless women, and we scourge, at the public whipping-post, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... III.—This, the last period of the Minoan civilization, commences with the destruction of the palace of Knossost somewhere before 1400 B.C., and presents no definite line of termination. The great style of art represented by the preceding period does not at once degenerate into barbarism. If, as seems probable, the men who destroyed the Cretan palaces were Mycenaeans of the mainland, more or less of the same stock as the Cretan representatives of the Minoan tradition, we can see how the catastrophe of the palaces ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... who devote themselves to athletic pursuits. There is my defense. In stating my case, I have spoken out of my own sincere respect for the interests of virtue and of learning; out of my own sincere admiration for those young men among us who are resisting the contagion of barbarism about them. In their future is the future hope of England. I ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... than it appeared to be physically. No virgin, surely, could keep a holy awe about her while stowed higgledy-piggledy with coarse-natured rustics into this narrowness and filth. Such a habitation is calculated to make beasts of men and women; and it indicates a degree of barbarism which I did not imagine to exist in Scotland, that a tiller of broad fields, like the farmer of Mauchline, should have his abode in a pigsty. It is sad to think of anybody—not to say a poet, but any human being—sleeping, eating, thinking, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food. During long intervals it has been utterly arrested, when nations were being rescued from barbarism and from the grasp of strangers, and when the perpetual struggle for existence, depriving men of all interest and understanding in politics, has made them eager to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, and ignorant ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... retained their nationality, from time to time making descents into the plains from one or other colony which they had established, always, however, to find new hordes of barbarians in possession. At length, when the great wave of barbarism had subsided, one Radu Negru, whose name is translated Rudolph the Black, the chief of the Daco-Roman colony of Fogaras in the Carpathians, descended into the plains with his followers, according to some writers in 1240 A.D., whilst others say in 1290, and, first fixing his capital ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... corn, which have civilized men, and ruined mankind. Accordingly both one and the other were unknown to the savages of America, who for that very reason have always continued savages; nay other nations seem to have continued in a state of barbarism, as long as they continued to exercise one only of these arts without the other; and perhaps one of the best reasons that can be assigned, why Europe has been, if not earlier, at least more constantly and better civilized ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... life which it involved, was yet no senseless duel between two jealous nations, but one of the most fruitful in results of all modern wars, rescuing whole provinces from Ottoman dominion, and leaving behind it in place of a chaos of outworn barbarism at least the elements for a future of national independence among the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... men's souls! The fact is, Mr. Morton, that the spirit of conservatism in this country is so strong that you cannot bear to part with a shred of the barbarism of the middle ages. And when a rag is sent to the winds you shriek with agony at the disruption, and think that the wound will be mortal." As Mr. Gotobed said this he extended his right hand and laid his left on ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... very friendly to us, and listen attentively to instruction conveyed to them in their own tongue. It is, however, difficult to give an idea to an Englishman of the little effect produced by our teaching, because no one can realise the degradation to which their minds have sunk by centuries of barbarism and hard struggling for the necessaries of life. Like most other savages, they listen with respect and attention to our talk; but when we kneel down and address an unseen Being, the position and the act often ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... that, James Buckley. I am nothing of the sort. When I was a young man, I had a sort of brute instinct, which made me take the same sort of pleasure in killing a boar that a cat does in killing a mouse; but I have outlived such barbarism." ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... control of the Jesuits, the French language was scarcely known. In fact, the fathers contented themselves with teaching their converts the doctrines and rites of the Roman Church, while retaining the food, dress, and habits of their original barbarism. ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... about to describe the tournament, which, after all, was only a glorified prize-fight, and, therefore, suited to days when few gentlemen could read, and no forks were used for meals. We call ourselves civilised now, yet some who consider themselves such, seem to entertain a desire to return to barbarism. Human nature, in truth, is the same in all ages, and what is called culture is only a thin veneer. Nothing but to be made partaker of the Divine nature ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... "would we throw a veil of oblivion over our transactions at Washington. The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America." A second English journal fitly denounced the proceedings as "a return to the times of barbarism." ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... of being brought into the competition. The vast cities of China are possible only in the lowest condition of individual liberty,—class servitude, sumptuary and travel restrictions, together with all the other complicated enginery of an artificial barbarism, being the only substitute for natural cohesion in a community whose immense mass can procure nothing but the rudest necessaries of life from the area ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... arise, with circumstances of contumely and outrage, growing out of deep inexorable malice, which cannot be redressed, as things now are, without an appeal to the voye de fait. 'But this is so barbarous an expedient in days of high civilisation.' Why, yes, it labours with the semi-barbarism of chivalry: yet, on the other hand, this mention of chivalry reminds me to say, that if this practice of duelling share the blame of chivalry, one memorable praise there is, which also it may claim as common to them both. It is a praise ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... sociability that is good for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or the individual to the state is sheer barbarism: the Greeks, sometimes invoked to support this form of idolatry, were never guilty of it; on the contrary, their lawgivers were always reforming and planning the state so that the soul might be perfect in it. Discipline ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... lifetime, are never the outcome of the constant, close relationship by which friend daily says to friend, "You are a second self to me"; for this, too, becomes a matter of use and wont. It is only by contact with the barbarism of the world without that the happiness of that intimate life is revealed to us as a sudden glad surprise. It is the outer world which renews the bond between friend and friend, lover and lover, all their lives long, wherever two great souls are knit together ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Christianity, believe the apparition of the manes or ghosts, and offer them a kind of sacrifice. I believe that prepossession, and the prejudices of childhood, have much more to do with this belief than reason and experience. In effect, among the Tartars, where barbarism and ignorance reign as much as in any country in the world, they talk neither of spirits nor of apparitions, no more than among the Mahometans, although they admit the apparitions of angels made to Abraham and ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... actually existing in all the splendor of its empire. I am filled with alarms for the event of the irruptions daily making on us, by the Goths, the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals, lest they should re-conquer us to our original barbarism. If I am sometimes induced to look forward to the eighteenth century, it is only when recalled to it by the recollection of your goodness and friendship, and by those sentiments of sincere esteem and respect with which I have ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... the eloquent Demosthenic Quandt, with admiration heightened by surprise;—wrote of Quandt to Voltaire; and, with sustained enthusiasm, to the Public long afterwards; and to the end of his days was wont to make Quandt an exception, if perhaps almost the only one, from German barbarism, and disharmony of mind and tongue. So that poor Quandt cannot ever since get entirely forgotten, but needs always to be raked up again, for this reason when others have ceased: an almost melancholy adventure for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hoop," pierced by half a dozen nails on which were spiked as many candles. It is not necessary to take the descriptions of these early playhouses as baldly literal, nor as indicative of something like barbarism. The "barrel hoop" chandelier of the old theater in Nassau street was doubtless only a primitive form of the chandeliers which kept their vogue for nearly a century after the first comedians sang and acted at the Nassau Street Theater. Illuminating gas did ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... him, and his mind harboured great thoughts, but alas! his rudeness and ignorance displayed the triumph of barbarism. He knew neither poetry, nor science, nor even the tongue of the Greeks, and he was ignorant, too, of the ancient traditions concerning the origin of the world and the nature of the gods. He bravely repeated fables which in my time would have brought ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... travellers, and coaxes flame from heaps of mouldering rubbish. There is no sense of cheer like this. Sincerity, clarity, candour, power, seem real once more, real and easy. In the light of great literary achievement, straight and wonderful, like the roads of the ancient Romans, barbarism torments the mind like a riddle. Yet there are the dusky barbarians!—fleeing from the harmonious tread of the ordered legions, running to hide themselves in the morass of vulgar sentiment, to ambush their nakedness in the sand-pits of ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... contest between these opposing principles is that which is raging in our country this day. Of course, any broad territorial representation of this must be of a very mixed quality. Our best civilizations are badly mottled with stains of barbarism. In no state or city can egotism, either of the hot-blooded or cold-blooded kind,—and the latter is far the more virulent,—be far to seek. On the other hand, no social system, thank God, can quite reverse the better instincts of humanity; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... in from all view of the table lands at the summit of these walls, this valley, at the time its great houses were occupied, must have presented a very striking picture of human life as it existed in the Middle Period of Barbarism. The greater part of the valley must have been covered with garden beds, from which the people derived their principal support, as the mesa lands without the canyon were too dry for cultivation. It no doubt presented an interesting picture of industrious ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... practised by them in catching fish, according to Nearchus: he also coincides with that author in various other particulars respecting the use of the bones of whales, or other large fish, in the construction of their houses; their ignorance and barbarism, their dress and mode of life. All this he probably borrowed from Nearchus; but he adds one circumstance which indubitably proves, that the knowledge of the eastern part of the world had considerably advanced since the era of Alexander: ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... done to emphasise the significance of the occasion," said Lady Bailquist, again consulting her programme. "The King of Wurtemberg, and two of the Bavarian royal Princes, an Abyssinian Envoy who is over here—he will lend a touch of picturesque barbarism to the scene—the general commanding the London district and a whole lot of other military bigwigs, and the Austrian, ...
— When William Came • Saki
... cases that you have read were tried in the last century, a period of judicial barbarism. Courts of justice are more enlightened and humane now, in our times. They do not sacrifice sacred life upon slight grounds. Come, take courage! be cheerful! trust in God, and all will ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and a most notorious corruption of manners in the English colonies settled on the continent of America, and the islands," and that "the Gospel hath hitherto made but very inconsiderable progress among the neighboring Americans, who still continue in much the same ignorance and barbarism in which we found them above a hundred years ago." After stating what he believes to be the causes of this state of things, he propounds his plan of training young natives, as missionaries to their ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... thing, even if he legalized the union by some form of marriage. In spite of her magnificent physical inheritance of health and vitality, in spite of the quick and passionate spirit that informed her, she would be the product of her environment and ancestry, held close to barbarism all her life. The man who mated with her would be dragged down to ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... social survival and even of civilization, yet viewed from the standpoint of present society it seems that our judgment of polygyny must be wholly unfavorable. In the first place, as we have already seen, polygyny is essentially an institution of barbarism. It arose largely through the practice of wife capture and the keeping of female slaves. While often adjusted to the requirements of barbarous societies, it seems in no way adjusted to a high civilization. Polygyny, indeed, must necessarily rest upon the subjection ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... of civilisation certainly are not the most civilised of individuals. They appear to consider yellow ochre and peacocks' feathers the climax of barbarism—marabouts and kalydor the acme of refinement. A ring through the nose calls forth their deepest pity—a diamond drop to the ear commands their highest respect. To them, nothing can show a more degraded state of nature than a New Zealand chief, with his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... given over to superstition I have no doubt that the most horrible disasters would also be expected as the penalty for interfering with any grave. It seems odd that a people who had a literature centuries before our Anglo-Saxon ancestors emerged from barbarism should now be the victims of superstitions almost as gross as those prevailing in Africa; but such are the facts. Chang Chih-tung, who died a few months ago, was one of the most progressive and enlightened ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... structures for the comfort and protection of their masters. Thus it was that mankind was first forced to toil and ultimately came to enjoy labor and its incident fruits, and thus human slavery became a first step from barbarism towards ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... proceedings and declared purposes, which exhibit a deliberate disregard of the principles of humanity and the rules of civilized warfare, and which must give to the existing war a character of extended devastation and barbarism at the very moment of negotiations for peace, invited by the enemy himself, leave no prospect of safety to anything within the reach of his predatory and incendiary operations but in manful and universal determination to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson |
