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Barbarian   Listen
noun
Barbarian  n.  
1.
A foreigner. (Historical) "Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me."
2.
A man in a rude, savage, or uncivilized state.
3.
A person destitute of culture.
4.
A cruel, savage, brutal man; one destitute of pity or humanity. "Thou fell barbarian."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Barbarian" Quotes from Famous Books



... frequently animated with the most implacable hatred. Among the citizens of Rome, in the early ages of that republic, the name of a foreigner, and that of an enemy, were the same. Among the Greeks, the name of Barbarian, under which that people comprehended every nation that was of a race, and spoke a language, different from their own, became a term of indiscriminate contempt and aversion. Even where no particular ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... greatest profusion. Here, by the side of the pound-rolls of butter lying on white-beet leaves, spread a gigantic Cantal cheese, cloven here and there as by an axe; then came a golden-hued Cheshire, and next a Gruyere, resembling a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot; whilst farther on were some Dutch cheeses, suggesting decapitated heads suffused with dry blood, and having all that hardness of skulls which in France has gained them the name of "death's heads." Amidst ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... say I could find a successor for your vacated niche," said Cicely lightly; "one thing I'm determined on though, he shan't be a musician. It's so unsatisfactory to have to share a grand passion with a grand piano. He shall be a delightful young barbarian who would think Saint Saens was a Derby ...
— When William Came • Saki

... gods of the Romans, Greeks, Christians, Jews, and barbarian nations, you are a noble-hearted woman," he said, "and that kiss is my tribute to you. Little wonder that puppy, Marcus, is called The Fortunate, since, even when he deserved to die who suffered himself to be taken alive, you appeared to save him—to ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... called herself "the place where the sun comes forth," and designated China as "the place where the sun sets." The idea, doubtless, was merely to distinguish between east and west, but the Sui sovereign resented the diction of this "barbarian letter." ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... enough—I know not which—for the Old World. I may make a place for myself in the new, which is not so full; and found a family there. When you are a mother yourself, and a great lady, perhaps I shall send you over from the plantation some day a little barbarian that is half Esmond half Mohock, and you will be kind to him for his father's sake, who was, after all, your kinsman; and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... board—no such article or packet is come; and I tell you what, I don't half like these fellows; I believe them to be custom-house spies: it was the custom-house barge they came in, so tell them in Moors to get about their business.' 'The man is a barbarian, sir,' said we to the cavalier; 'but what you expected is certainly not come.' A deep shade of melancholy came over the countenance of the cavalier: he looked us wistfully in the face, and sighed; then, turning to his companions, ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... Seb. Barbarian, thou canst part us but a moment! We shall be one again in thy despite. Life is but air, That yields a passage to the whistling sword, And closes ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... His holy name, that He was cast down the "middle wall of partition" between the Jew and Gentile!—that there is no respect of persons with Him!—that "Greek" and "Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond" and "free," ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... messenger of the god that I did not deserve the honour he brought me, and that a meaning had been given to my verses which they did not bear. In truth I have not in my fourth Eclogue betrayed the faith of my ancestors. Some ignorant Jews alone have interpreted in favour of a barbarian god a verse which celebrates the return of the golden age predicted by the Sibylline oracles. I excused myself then on the ground that I could not occupy a place which was destined for me in error and to which I recognised that ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... of person and property begins to be felt, the sword is sheathed, the pen and the ploughshare commence alike to reclaim the mental and the physical soil, and civilization comes, like the dawn, however slowly advancing, to prepare the heart of the barbarian for the burst of light, in the rising of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... themselves entered the country as robbers of the soil and spoliators of the people, were determined to do their best to keep out all future intruders; and it was for this reason that, suspicious of the aims of the barbarian, every possible obstacle was placed in the way of those who wished to learn to speak and read Chinese. This suspicion was very much increased in the case of missionaries, whose real object the Manchus failed to appreciate, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... of Whampoa is strictly Chinese, and separated from contact with the "outside barbarian," as much as is Canton, by its walls. It is true, you may be allowed to pass its gates, but run a risk of being hustled and pelted out ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... sense and appreciation of the true morality, ravishing in its utter novelty for the young barbarian, was cherished by the Marchesino until he began almost to swell with virtue, and to start on stilts to heaven, big with the message that wickedness was for the young and must not be meddled with by any one over thirty—the age ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... love's sake, or its more recent development of the "virile," the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent agonies of self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral experiences of the insane asylums. With his vain posturings and his ridiculous splendor he is really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and his delusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of a savage, which the guilty author of his being does his best—or his worst —in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader as something generous ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... condition of the barbarian world. Then the wants of man were few, and the objects within his reach. While he could acquire these, he lived in a state of individual independence; the consequence of which was, there were as many nations as persons, each contending with the other, to secure something which he ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine

... forefathers! Wherever else he may set his plebeian foot, Lexley Hall shall be sacred. Rather see the old place burned to the ground—rather set fire to it with my own hands—than conceive that, when I am in my grave, it could possibly be subjected to the rule of such a barbarian!" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... soul? peace of mind? I have been promising them all my life to others—have I found them myself? And here is this poor boy saying that he has gained them—in the very barbarian superstition which I have been anathematising to him! What is true, at this rate? What is false? Is anything right or wrong? except in as far as men feel it to be right or wrong. Else whence does this poor fellow's peace come, or the peace of many ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... its function, and so far has not been made to, and the lack must be supplied. The personal point of view, inculcated now by modern conditions of strife for money, just as surely as it must have been by barbarian struggle in pre-civilized days, must be supplanted by the broad view of majority welfare. The extreme of the personal point of view, expressed in such phrases as "The world owes me a living;" "My child is mine to treat as I please;" "It is nobody's business how I spend my money;" ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards

... conquest or colonization by which the ancient civilized world, originally made up of communities like the Greeks and Phoenicians in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Seas, spread to southern Italy and adjacent lands. The Roman conquest of Italy and of the barbarian tribes of western Europe expanded the civilized world to the shores of the Atlantic. Within this greater Roman world new nations grew up. The migration of Europeans to the American continent was ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton

... robbed some eight or nine years ago, by a set of vandals, who, through sheer wantonness, broke many of the stalactites, leaving them strewn on the floor—a disgustful memorial of their vulgar propensities and barbarian-like conduct. ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt

... Matt. 27:45), "against this the children of this world object: How is it such a phenomenal occurrence is not related by any writer, whether Greek or barbarian?" And he says that someone of the name of Phlegon "relates in his chronicles that this took place during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, but he does not say that it occurred at the full moon." It may be, therefore, that because it was not the time for an eclipse, the various ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... seemed, however, essential to the strength of their own case that they should admit her to have been cruelly deceived, they graciously made the admission, and continued to know her. It followed that Mrs Merdle, as a woman of fashion and good breeding who had been sacrificed to the wiles of a vulgar barbarian (for Mr Merdle was found out from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the moment he was found out in his pocket), must be actively championed by her order for her order's sake. She returned this fealty by causing it to be understood that she was even more incensed against ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... It was an innate gift of mimicry which had made him the greatest investigator of his day. He could have studied Chinese social life for six months and thereupon have become a mandarin whom his own servants would never have suspected to be a "foreign barbarian." It was pure genius, as opposed to ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer

... flashed upon all beholders. The stranger was no disguised masquerader, but a veritable brave of the American forest. Of this there could be no doubt. No white man that ever lived could learn to give utterance to such an ejaculation. The yell had no sooner sounded than the barbarian's tomahawk leapt from its girdle. He sprang upon the luckless Turk, and twined his fingers in the poor wretch's hair. For a single second the tomahawk flashed before the astonished eyes of the spectators; and then, before the latter had time—even if they ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... said Miss Toland again. "I get to be a perfect barbarian—eating alone!" She rummaged in a closet. "Here's some jam Sally sent," said she, producing it. "They are always sending me pies and fresh eggs and jelly; they are always afraid of my starving ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris

... personal courage, they are dull and stupid, and cannot be transformed into intelligent soldiers. It may be wondered why the Sierra Leonean, who alone among the West Africans is an English-speaking negro, should be worse than his more barbarian neighbours; but I believe the solution may be found in the fact that the large proportion of slaves landed in former days at Sierra Leone from captured slavers were so-called Eboes, from the tribes of the Niger delta; ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis

... the spot where the two officers were in ambush, still keeping his own eye on the ship. A few steps brought him within reach of Captain Truck, who drew back his arm until the elbow reached his own hip, when he darted it forward, and dealt the incautious barbarian a severe blow between the eyes. The Arab fell like a slaughtered ox, and before his senses were fairly recovered, he was bound hands and feet, and rolled over the bank down upon the beach, with little ceremony, his fire-arms remaining with ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... person to have come suddenly into the country unacquainted with any circumstances that had passed since the days of Sujah ul Dowlah, he would naturally ask—what cruel hand has wrought this wide desolation, what barbarian foe has invaded the country, has desolated its fields, depopulated its villages? He would ask, what disputed succession, civil rage, or frenzy of the inhabitants, had induced them to act in hostility to the words of God, and the beauteous works of man? He would ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... brutality, while from poverty, timidity, helplessness, and a dread of publicity or censure, they endure their wrongs in silence, and continue to bear children cursed from their conception with intemperance and brutality. And when they seek to escape, a barbarian law comes in to give the brutal husband the ownership of their offspring; and thus they are bound fast as galley slaves in their ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various

... closely as they fared through the town, and though she was quick to perceive, she did not seem surprised at the novelties she saw, whereby Castus found himself more attracted by her than ever. Barbarian she might be held in Rome, but there was a beauty, pride, and strength in her he had never met with on ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... name of Malayu received additional celebrity from the marriages of granddaughters of Demang Lebar Daun with the Batara of Majapahit and the Emperor of China! The contemptuous style in which Malay, Javanese, and other barbarian rajas are spoken of by ancient Chinese historians leaves but slender probability to the legend that an Emperor of China once took a Malay ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell

... their unhappy victim fled to the rising of the sun, where the luminary of day seems to us first to ascend from the waves of the ocean, the power of the tyrant was still behind him; if he withdrew to the west, to Hesperian darkness and the shores of barbarian Thule, still he was not safe from his gore-drenched foe. Rum! Whisky! Alcohol! Fiend! Monster! Devil! Art thou the offspring in whom the lineaments of these tyrants are faithfully preserved? Was the world, with all its climates, made in vain for thy ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... groves were God's first temples," "and for the strength of the hills, the Swiss mountains bless him"; and as to books, I read Shakespeare, David, Spenser, Paul, Coleridge, Burns, and Shelley, which are never old. In good sooth, I fancy that nature intended me for an Arab or some other nomadic barbarian, and by mistake my soul got packed up in a Christianized set of bones and muscles. How I shall ever be able to content myself to live in a decent, proper, well-behaved house, where toilet-tables are toilet-tables, and not an ingenious combination of trunk and claret-cases, where lanterns are not ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... courage. Courage is a force of will driving you into danger for some high purpose. I want you to realize that I am not such a barbarian that I do not know that I could have kept you out of it all if I had had proper self-control. Though probably, on the impulse, I would do the fool thing over again! Yes, that's the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... cheerfully. "If here there are no men, then there will rise no barbarian hordes to dispute our rule. Asti has led us to safety. Let us see more of ...
— The Gifts of Asti • Andre Alice Norton

... Conventionist of '93 was forced, by the views of the men of whom he so strangely found himself the chief, to become in effect the ally of the Austrian Kaiser and the Russian Czar. The Italians, who were seeking only to get rid of "barbarian" rule, and the Hungarians, who were contending for the preservation of a polity as old as the English Constitution against the destructives of the imperial court, were held up to the world as men desirous in their zeal for revolution to overturn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... belonged to him who was actually possessed of it." Pepin took the hint. He persuaded Childeric, the last of the Merovingians to become a monk and then made himself king with the approval of the other Germanic chieftains. But this did not satisfy the shrewd Pepin. He wanted to be something more than a barbarian chieftain. He staged an elaborate ceremony at which Boniface, the great missionary of the European northwest, anointed him and made him a "King by the grace of God." It was easy to slip those words, "Del gratia," into the coronation service. It took almost fifteen ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... bicycle. The Doctor feels certain that I may reasonably anticipate the pleasure of making my way through a howling wilderness of hooting Celestials from one end of the country to the other. The great danger, he thinks, will be not so much the well-known aversion of the Chinese to having an "outer barbarian" penetrate the sacred interior of their country, as the enormous crowds that would almost constantly surround me out of curiosity at both rider and wheel, and the moral certainty of a foreigner unwittingly ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... the eastern edge of the Atlantic—have had reason to regret approximation to those shores, known in ship parlance as the Barbary coast; but which, with a slight alteration in the orthography, might be appropriately styled "Barbarian." ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid

... beginnings to that which the Hyksos exercised at first over the nomes of Egypt. The Cossaean kings did not merely bring with them their army, but their whole nation, who spread over the whole land. As in the case of the Hyksos, the barbarian conquerors thus became merged in the more civilised people which they had subdued. But the successors of Gandish were unable permanently to retain their ascendancy over all the districts and provinces, and several of these ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... respective claims of patriotism and personal dignity before taking their coats off. So we cannot lay our want of progress to the charge of that dogged band of Greathearts which has been holding on, and holding on, and holding on—while the people at home were making up for lost time—ever since the barbarian was hurled back from the Marne to the Aisne and confined behind his earthen barrier. We shall win this war one day, and most of the credit will go, as usual, to those who are in at the finish. But—when we assign the glory and ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay

... BOSWELL. 'But what motive could he have to make himself a Laplander?' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, he must either mean the word Laplander in a very extensive sense, or may mean a voluntary degradation of himself. "For all my being the great man that you see me now, I was originally a Barbarian;" as if Burke should say, "I came over a wild Irishman." Which he might say in his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... Circumcision was doubtless practised from ages immemorial by the peoples of Central Africa, and Welcker found traces of it in a mummy of the xvith century B.C. The Jews borrowed it from the Egyptian priesthood and made it a manner of sacrament, "uncircumcised" being"unbaptised," that is, barbarian, heretic; it was a seal of reconciliation, a sign of alliance between the Creator and the Chosen People, a token of nationality imposed upon the body politic. Thus it became a cruel and odious protestation against ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... American-looking tenements on the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as arches of triumph and temples of the gods. I tried to convert the clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the passing populace as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... as there were days intervening before the deadly assault should begin. One stick was to be drawn from the bundle every day until but one remained, which was to signal the outbreak for that day. This was the best calendar the barbarian mind could devise. At Pittsburgh, a Delaware squaw who was friendly to the whites had stealthily taken out three of the sticks, thus precipitating the attack on Fort Pitt three days in advance of ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church

... field of labour; to test, examine, scrutinise. [22] He must be ready to requite where due the favour of a service well performed, nor hesitate to visit the penalty of their deserts upon those neglectful of their duty. [23] Indeed (he added), the answer of the barbarian to the king seems aposite. You know the story, [24] how the king had met with a good horse, but wished to give the creature flesh and that without delay, and so asked some one reputed to be clever about horses: "What will give him flesh most quickly?" ...
— The Economist • Xenophon

... that one flat stone would lie on top of another, and that a little mud, aided by Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravitation, would hold them together, and that walls could be built in the form of a quadrangle. Here was the birth of architecture. And thus, from the magical dreams of this unmausoleumed barbarian was evolved the home, the best and ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... through it, and insists upon a present revelation, we are apt to cry "heretic;" when the poet strikes his roots through it, as Whitman did, and insists upon giving us reality,—giving us himself before custom or law,—we cry "barbarian," or "art-heretic," ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has been determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... populations, of power and culture, of pleasure and business. It needed a man of unlimited versatility, of education, of immense human sympathy and breadth, to go out there with the gospel message—a man who could not only be a Jew to the Jews, but a Greek to the Greeks, a Roman to the Romans, a barbarian to the barbarians—a man who could encounter not only rabbis in their synagogues, but proud magistrates in their courts and philosophers in the haunts of learning—a man who could face travel by land and by sea, who could exhibit presence ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... to the aesthetic. But these writers have apparently confounded Great-great-grandfather Puritan with Grandpa Victorian, the Victorian that Matthew Arnold scolded and Shaw made fun of. He is a type as different from the real Puritan as the slum dweller from the primitive barbarian. "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour" to flay such ignorant traducers of those who knew at least the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... science, consider the art of the French cave men. The archaeologist finds in the caverns bones of various mammals, teeth of cave bear, and antlers of reindeer carved with animal figures. The art is good for a barbarous people, but it is certainly barbarian art. The range of designs is quite great: horses, bears, mammoths, reindeer, are among the figures. The people who did this work were an artistic people. To carve and represent animal forms was almost a mania with them. An ethnic impulse seems ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... old world; their renewed invasions crushed out, in the course of a few years, the Greek and Roman civilization; and everywhere darkness succeeded to light. The religion of Jesus Christ was alone capable of resisting this barbarian invasion, and science and literature, together with the arts, disappeared from the face of the earth, taking refuge in the churches and monasteries. It was there that they were preserved as a sacred deposit, and it was ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... weariness, with a welcome more than common; and when his approach was announced, the polished circle looked for the advent of a lout from the plough, in whose uncouth manners and embarrassed address they might find matter both for mirth and wonder. But they met with a barbarian who was not at all barbarous: as the poet met in Lord Daer feelings and sentiments as natural as those of a ploughman, so they met in a ploughman manners worthy of a lord: his air was easy and unperplexed: his address was perfectly well-bred, and elegant ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... do this," said Giurgenow; "all Europe would call him a barbarian, and make him answerable for ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... lodge was crowded almost to suffocation by eager spectators; now a dance, of the peculiar Indian kind; now some solemn ceremony to propitiate the spirits who were supposed to rule the weather, the crops, the hunting, and all the interests of barbarian life. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... she mused, presently, "that night that the next time I fell over a bundle I'd leave it where I found it. Ah, well! I'm not a barbarian; I couldn't do that. I never thought, though, it would ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various

... come for an especial purpose,' answered Rex. 'It appears that, in the inscrutable ways of fate, I have passed for an ill-mannered barbarian in your eyes, and so I have come to show myself and to tell you what I think ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... he; "heaven has sent you to the aid of a barbarian who was pitilessly murdering the mother tongue of Tasso. Formerly," continued he, "pantomime answered to talk with women as well as language; now, however, I must explain myself in another manner. I cannot, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... men-at-arms, whose services, it was felt, might be required, if the native tribes were not sufficiently impressed with the advantages of commercial dealings. An expedition then started from Thebes under the conduct of a royal ambassador, who was well furnished with gifts for distribution among the barbarian chiefs, and instructed to proceed with his fleet down the Red Sea to its mouth, or perhaps even further, and open communications with the land of "Punt," which was in this quarter. "Punt" has been generally identified with Southern ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... placing one above the other these stones, whose enormity now amazes us. And the prodigious feasts, the music of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the slaughters and battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of the world, an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian peoples who commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege and pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of beasts. To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! And these same ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... "that, though you may render all explosives useless, and blow up forts and battleships and arsenals, you will not stop war. You will merely compel it to shift to another basis—to the old basis, probably, of brute strength, of hand-to-hand combat. And if you do that, the old days will return of barbarian invasions. The Turk will sweep down again on southern Europe; the Tartars will invade us from the east. You will not assist civilisation; you will set it back a thousand years. It will have to fight again for its very existence, as it did in ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... equal care and attention his yellow and red ochre on particular parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he judges most becoming; whoever despises the other for this attention to the fashion of his country, whichever of these two first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds

... Then the little barbarian, evidently maddened by the sneering pomposity of our eloquent guest, strutted across the floor in perfect imitation of Holmes' affected grandiloquence; then he launched ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... circumstances, and to make use of the abilities of all the members of the community, to give them a voice in the local assembly, and a right to hold public office. Such progressive communities were the city states of Greece, the republic of Rome, and the rural communities of the barbarian Germans before they settled in the Roman Empire. When the Greek communities became decadent they fell under foreign dominion; Rome imperialized the republic, but never forgot how to rule well in her municipalities; the Germans passed on their democratic ways ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... shewing, by marks of the greatest indignation, how much she detested him; and when her son had finished his story, she broke out into a thousand reproaches against that vile impostor. She called him perfidious traitor, barbarian, assassin, deceiver, magician, and an enemy and destroyer of mankind. "Without doubt, child," added she, "he is a magician, and they are plagues to the world, and by their enchantments and sorceries have commerce with the devil. Bless God for preserving you from his wicked designs; for ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... of Augustus, the emperor of Rome in its golden age of prosperity, an earnest effort was made to subdue and civilize barbarian Germany. Drusus, the step-son of the emperor, led the first army of invasion into this forest-clad land of the north, penetrating deeply into the country and building numerous forts to guard his conquests. His last invasion took him as far as the Elbe. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... as contemporaries; just as I have known people in England, deceived by the distance of place, take it for granted that all persons who live in India are neighbours, and ask an inhabitant of Bombay about the health of an acquaintance at Calcutta. It is to be hoped that no barbarian deluge will ever again pass over Europe. But should such a calamity happen, it seems not improbable that some future Rollin or Gillies will compile a history of England from Miss Porter's Scottish Chiefs, Miss Lee's Recess, and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... grooms of his bedchamber, took the liberty of asking his majesty what benefit he expected to reap if he should be successful in conquering the Romans?—Jesus! said the King, peevishly; why the question answers itself. When we have overcome the Romans, no province, no town, whether Greek or barbarian, will be able to resist us: we shall at once be masters of all Italy. Cineas after a short pause replied, And having subdued Italy, what shall we do next?—Do next? answered Pyrrhus; why, seize Sicily. Very likely, quoth ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... repeated in a smaller circle, a minute representation of the copy would be devoid of the greatness and novelty of the original. The pride of the second Justin, of Tiberius, and Maurice, was humbled by a proud Barbarian, more prompt to inflict, than exposed to suffer, the injuries of war; and as often as Asia was threatened by the Persian arms, Europe was oppressed by the dangerous inroads, or costly friendship, of the Avars. When the Roman envoys approached the presence of the chagan, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... impossible to bring Italy under one head; and has been the cause of her always living subject to many princes or rulers, by whom she has been brought to such division and weakness as to have become a prey, not to Barbarian kings only, but to any who have thought fit to attack her. For this, I say, we Italians have none to thank but the Church. And were any man powerful enough to transplant the Court of Rome, with all the authority it now ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... resentment at the dancing lights in hers, as he cynically gave her a bald abstract of the unfortunate mission. He reflected that commonly he would have fitted a different mask to the ugly skull of fact, but this young barbarian, as he chose to regard her, excited the elemental truth in him, defying him to appear at his worst. He was astonished to see her eyes suddenly soften and ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... operas—scheming and sketching, if not actually composing and writing—he would seem at this stage of his growth to have been a Mr. Micawber, whose contemporary, of course, he was. He flirted with von Luettichau, the intendant of the theatre, a fine specimen of a court barbarian. Wagner neither would nor wouldn't; and it was only when the theatre found it could not well do without him, and asked him to say definitely if he would, that he accepted the offer. We can imagine how poor, stupid, unimaginative ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... no despair; but did be mixt in the heart with a great fear for Mine Own, and a strange and exulting gladness that I should do that day some deed for Mine Own Maid; and truly this to be the pomp of love and the heart-cry of the barbarian, as you shall say. And this maybe; but truly I did be proper human, and to make no excuse because that I was natural; neither have I hid anywheres aught that I did ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... was brought round in due time, but just then another vehicle of the same kind, only prettier and with two ponies, was seen at the gate, too late for the barbarian instinct of rushing away to hide from morning visitors to be carried out, before Lady Merrifield and a daughter, were up the slope and on the levelled road before ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... The scattered barbarian tribes of the Delta, whether Hebrews or the remnant of the iiyksos, had endured there a miserable lot ever since the accession of the Ramessides. The rebuilding of the cities which had been destroyed there during the wars with the Hyksos had restricted the extent ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... 'ballads' by courtesy or convention, are set beside the rugged and hard-featured aborigines of the tribe, just as the delicate bust of Clytie in the British Museum has for next neighbour the rude and bold 'Unknown Barbarian Captive.' To contrast by such enforced juxtaposition a ballad of the golden world with a ballad by Mr. Kipling is unfair to either, each being excellent in its way; and the collocation of Edward or Lord Randal with ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick

... that Heaven is (thus) reproving (you)? Why is it that Heaven is not blessing (you)? You neglect your great barbarian (foes), And regard me with hatred. You are regardless of the evil omens (that abound [2]), And your demeanour is all unseemly. (Good) men are going away, And the country is sure ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... man's achievement. For he is a child of earth—a gentle, kindly savage, a white man with the soul of an Indian. But Posey has done his best to correct nature's mistake, and has made himself as much of an Indian as his white man's heritage will allow. He is a nomad, as thorough a nomad as any barbarian who never heard of those wondrous works of man called civilization. In all that wide stretch of country which he frequents and in which he has lived for thirty years and better, there is not one spot which he can call home. But that is nothing to Posey. He would not know what to do with ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly

... the safeguards of civilisation may be seen in the increased effectiveness of weapons for coastal defence. The hideous nightmare of a barbarian irruption, such as those which almost erased culture and intellect from the face of Europe during the dark ages of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, may occasionally be seen exercising its influence in the pessimistic writings which are from time to time issued from the Press ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... wheat; thought turned the sweet briar into the crimson rose; brains mixed the pigments for Paul Veronese, and gave the canvas worth a few florins the value of tens of thousand of dollars. Already wise thoughts have turned the barbarian into a gentleman and citizen, and some glad day thoughts will crown man with the attributes and qualities ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... preparing war against his brother Artaxerxes Mnemon, King of Persia, Xenophon went with him. After the death of Cyrus on the plains of Cunaxa, the barbarian auxiliaries fled, and the Greeks were left to return as they could from the far region between the Tigris and Euphrates. Xenophon had to take part in the conduct of the retreat, and tells the story of it in his "Anabasis," ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon

... a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking economic significance in these class differences is the distinction maintained between the employments proper to the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... was materially affected by the need, throughout many centuries, of systematic methods of defense against the Ainu. The rise of the Shogunate dates back to 883 A.D., when the chief of the forces opposing the Ainu was appointed by the Emperor and bore the official title, "The Barbarian-expelling Generalissimo." This office developed in power until, some centuries later, it usurped in fact, if not in name, all ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... losing one head, grow another. Mesu is not of such exalted or supernatural villainy that they can not fill his place. Wilt thou execute Israel one by one as it raises up a leader against thee? Nay; and wilt thou play the barbarian and put two and a half million ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... and jealous. He did not hesitate to murder Stilicho as soon as he was old enough to see the power he was wielding. With Stilicho's death his fortune departed. Rome was besieged, captured, and sacked by the barbarian ALARIC, in 410. When this evil was past, numerous contestants arose in different parts of the Empire, each eager for a portion of the fabric which was now so obviously ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell

... it may be, are the kinds of speaking sounds in the world, and none is without significance. (11)If then I know not the meaning of the sound, I shall be to him that speaks a barbarian, and he that speaks a barbarian to me. (12)So also ye, since ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may abound in them to the edification of ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various

... Israelite advancing upon him with drawn sword, the great barbarian freed himself from the burden of the girl by throwing her heavily to the ground, where she lay, for the breath was shaken out of her. Then snatching the cloak from his throat he wound it over his left arm to serve as a shield, and with a savage yell, rushed straight at Aziel, purposing to transfix ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard

... he carried in his mind;' that is, from what he intended in his mind. [382] A beautiful and vivid description of a man who is conscious of his guilt, and is pursued by all: it is a situation which would have paralysed the mental energy of even the most enterprising barbarian. ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... meanings which they give to this term? What are their aims, respectively? One is endeavoring to enforce the rigid and insurmountable barriers of caste; the other commends a mission of love which shall regard neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. It will become apparent, I think, that there may be parallels or similarities which relate to mere phrases while their ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... classes of people to ruin and despair, filled the country with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was secure, and produced, with the best intentions, a disorganization of society which had not been produced in that country by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders. Yet the usage of persons capable of so gross a misapprehension determines the meaning of language; and the words they thus misuse grow in generality, until the instructed are obliged to acquiesce; and to employ those words (first freeing them from ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... he seeks his home, More firmly fixt in sage considerate Rome. Here all the virtues long resplendent shone All that was Greek, barbarian and her own; She school'd him sound, and boasted to extend Thro time's long course and earth's remotest end His glorious reign of reason; soon to cease The clang of arms, and rule the world in peace. Great was the sense he gain'd, and well defined The various functions of his tutor'd mind; ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... device is not for the French. Any attempt to propagate it among our people under cover of patriotism must fail. It is good enough for barbarian countries! But our country has no use for hatred. Our genius never yet asserted itself by denying or destroying the genius of other countries, but by absorbing them. Let the troublous North and the loquacious South come ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... "Who?" said Pococurante, "that barbarian, who writes a long commentary in ten books of harsh verse on the first chapter of Genesis; that coarse imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the Creation, and who, while Moses represents the Eternal producing ...
— Candide • Voltaire

... carries in her hands the fate of her race—of the Hellenic, the nobler world, threatened by the barbarian, the baser world. She dies, to live. It's the motive of all great art—all ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... width of a bull's- hide. We do not, however, wish it to be inferred from this classical parallel, that our settlers claim to have rivalled the adroitness of the Punic queen in her dealings with the barbarian prince: ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... was all the easier, as I could not suspect what was the subject of this flow of barbarian words; all I understood was that, when the ladies spoke to me, they addressed me as "Istok,"[7] a jest which I found quite out of place, not knowing that it was the German for "Why don't you eat?" For you must know the coffee ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... But it was not only the material products of the East that the sailors of Amalfi conveyed to Europe in their home-bound argosies; for they brought back with them the rudiments of arts and sciences that distracted Italy had well-nigh forgotten during the period of the barbarian invasions. Through the merchant princes of Amalfi, the secrets of astronomy, of mathematics and of scientific navigation were re-introduced into the land that had almost lost its old Roman civilization. A priceless manuscript ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... is the Bubi name for black men who are not Bubis, these were in old days Portuguese slaves, "Porto" being evidently a corruption of "Portuguese," but it is used alike by the Bubi to designate Sierra Leonian and Accras, in fact, all the outer barbarian blacks. The name for white men, Mandara, used by the Bubis, has a sort of resemblance to the Effik name for whites, Makara, i.e., the ruling one, but I do not know whether these two words have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First Freedom, and then glory—when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption,—barbarian at last, And history with its volume vast, Hath but ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... proud, treacherous, courageous, likeable, untrustworthy. They career around on their high, short-stirruped saddles; they saunter indolently in small groups; they hang about the hotel hoping for a dicker of some kind. There is nothing of the savage about them, but much of the true barbarism, with the barbarian's pride, treachery, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... Torn from her home. Ruthlessly dragged, perhaps, from her evening devotions, by the hands of a relentless barbarian. Could she forgive him? ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... extent, the responsibility thrown upon himself for his own well-being; he must have prospective cares, and grow acquainted with the thoughtful virtue of prudence. That release from reflection, and anxiety for the future, which is the compensating privilege of the slave or the barbarian, he cannot hope any longer to enjoy. Whatever its value, he must renounce it. He must become one of us, knowing good and evil, looking before and behind. In this direction—in the gradual improvement of the labourer—lies our future progress, progress slow and toilsome, little suited to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... I am about to make will stamp me in the minds of a great many people as an irredeemable barbarian. I care little for that, however, and I am staunch in the opinions which I have held all my lifetime. Perhaps my voice may find ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray

... possession of all our strongholds? And if he become master of this country, shall we not incur foul disgrace? Are not they, to whom we promised sure protection in case of war, at this moment in hostilities? Is he not an enemy, holding our possessions—a barbarian [Footnote: Barbarians (among the Greeks) designates persons who were not of Hellenic origin. Alexander, an ancestor of Philip, had obtained admission to the Olympic games by proving himself to be of Argive descent. But the Macedonian people were scarcely considered as Greeks till a ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes

... continent as to our own. There was some truth in Carlyle's sneer after all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had only the success of physical growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the map—barbarian mass only; but had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin's point on the chart of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... [178] affection, hopeful and animated, the return of its emperor, for whose ovation various adornments were preparing along the streets through which the imperial procession would pass. He had left Rome just twelve months before, amid immense gloom. The alarm of a barbarian insurrection along the whole line of the Danube had happened at the moment when Rome was ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... Prince. Here he beheld a diamond so extraordinary for size and beauty that from that instant he had only one desire in life: honour, reputation, friendship, the love of country, he was ready to sacrifice all for this lump of sparkling crystal. For three years he served this semi-barbarian potentate as Jacob served Laban; he falsified frontiers, he connived at murders, he unjustly condemned and executed a brother-officer who had the misfortune to displease the Rajah by some honest freedoms; lastly, at a time of great danger ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... reproach to Great Britain, the mistress of the sea, that she had tamely suffered a barbarian power to commit such atrocious ravages on the fleets and shores of the minor states along the Mediterranean. At length a good cause was ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... my home, Thy speech is as my absence, long drawn out. Well measured praise from other lips must come; I pray thee stint thy woman's blandishments, Nor, like some proud barbarian's minion vile, Crawl to my feet with abject flatteries. I would not have thy draperies on me draw The evil eye; to gods such state belongs, Not mortals; for a mortal thus to tread On broidery were to tempt the wrath of heaven. Pay ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith

... the characteristic sentence: "On the whole they [i.e. the studies of earlier society] suggest that the differences which, after ages of change, separate the civilised man from savage or barbarian, are not so great as the vulgar opinion would have them.... Like the savage, he is a man of party with a newspaper for a totem ... and like a savage he is apt to make ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... of paintings or sculpture is a temple of Art, and he is little better than a barbarian who can enter it without a feeling of reverence for the presiding divinity of the place. Loud talking, laughing, pushing before others who are examining a picture or statue, moving seats noisily, or any rude or discourteous conduct, ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells

... of myself. Having heard many speeches from my father and elder men I am not ill-informed. Now that I have caught you I will administer to you the rebuke you richly deserve. You sprinkle altars from the same lustral-bowl, like relatives, at Olympia, Pylae, Delphi and many other places. Though the barbarian enemy is on you in armed force, you destroy Greek ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... how horrible is night! ...There the shout Of battle, the barbarian yell, the bray Of dissonant instruments, the clang of arms, The shriek of agony, the groan of death, In one wild uproar and continuous din, Shake the still air; while overhead, the moon, Regardless of the stir of this low world, Holds on her ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... with the mouth open or breathes through the mouth, and in fact it is believed that it is only civilized man who so perverts nature's functions, as the savage and barbarian races almost invariably breathe correctly. It is probable that this unnatural habit among civilized men has been acquired through unnatural methods of living, enervating luxuries ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka



Words linked to "Barbarian" :   savage, cannibal, noncivilized, hunter-gatherer, anthropophagite, peasant, man-eater, primitive, anthropophagus, vandal, wild, Odovacar, tike, Odovakar, Odoacer, disagreeable person, uncivilized



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