Kathleen Parker Quotes

Are we savages or what?

We're going through a kind of ancient, barbaric war dance now - it's almost an ultimate in absurdity.

Wild Scots …. They live on others, and follow their own worthless and savage chief in all evil courses sooner than they will pursue honest industry. They are full of mutual dissention, and war rather than peace, is their normal condition.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.

Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt.

If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer

Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

There is no greater evil than anarchy.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Civilization is hideously fragile … there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

The Mohammadan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

… the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Societies organized for the interplay of individual self-interest can collapse into manic tribalism, if not nihilistic violence.

Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.