There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization,...

What more you expect from a nation that honors a barbarian.

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as ‘the outpost of Western Christian civilisation’: France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as...

The Guti were a band of mountain barbarians. It’s always the way, isn’t it? Everything is blamed on ‘the barbarians

O [Roman] people be ashamed; be ashamed of your lives. Almost no cities are free of evil dens, are altogether free of impurities, except the cities in which the barbarians have begun to live…Let nobody...

[O]ne person’s ‘barbarian’ is another person’s ‘just doing what everybody else is doing.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the...

Some people fight fire with fire. I’ve found water to be more effective.

Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians… and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me,...

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...

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the...