39 Quotes About Barbarians

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

No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

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

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 poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

Civilization is much more than the survival of the fittest and the unrelenting culling of the weakest members. Civilized people share a value system that extends far beyond doing whatever it takes to survive. Mere barbarians might be devoted to a life of exploitation. In contrast, civilized people value nature and care for the most vulnerable members of their kind.

There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

As man becomes more technologically advanced, his barbarity becomes even more lethal

By Duraden, I have trolls dancing in my head this morning!' Stubble grumbled, screwing his eyes into a squint at the bright morning light.