Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

It was unearthly, and the men were–No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it–this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and...

Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.

Your love for beauty has been perverted, repressed and savaged by hateful and controlling elements in the world.

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion...

My savage indignation toward injustice is proportionate to my profoundly reverent connection with beauty.

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

There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.

The creatures I have sent to their God are not men. They abdicated the right to the name by committing acts of inhuman savagery so that they cannot even count themselves among God’s beasts. For...

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own...

For many years I have regarded the Pentateuch simply as a record of a barbarous people, in which are found a great number of the ceremonies of savagery, many absurd and unjust laws, and thousands...

Other folk thought the Rage was simple bloodlust, a berserk savagery that neither knew nor cared what its target was, and so it was when it struck without warning. But when a hradani gave himself...

There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.

It was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against...

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight...