America is the only nation in history which, miraculously…

“America is the only civilization in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization”

— Georges Clemenceau

“American society is the only one which has passed directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing civilisation.”

— Albert Jay Nock

The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial…

— Antoine Rivarol

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization…

— C. S. Lewis

“Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure…

— Will Durant

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet…

— John Buchan

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line…

— Edward Bellamy

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical…

— Augustus William Hare

“Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have…

— Iain Pears

Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.

— Robert Green Ingersoll

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a…

— Robert Graves

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations. Man's capacity for…

— J. William Fulbright

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

[Much] as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year . . . what vile…

— Winston Churchill

That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws;…

— Edward Gibbon