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Barbarian   /bɑrbˈɛriən/   Listen
Barbarian

adjective
1.
Without civilizing influences.  Synonyms: barbaric, savage, uncivilised, uncivilized, wild.  "Barbaric practices" , "A savage people" , "Fighting is crude and uncivilized especially if the weapons are efficient" , "Wild tribes"






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"Barbarian" Quotes from Famous Books



... was an awful resolution in her manner, that riveted me to my place.—O fool!—dolt!—barbarian! Cursed as I am, with more imperfections than my fellow wretches, kind Fortune sent a heaven-gifted cherub to my aid, and, like a ruffian, I have driven her from my side!—I must now haste to my appointment. Well, my mind is tuned for such a scene. I shall wish only to ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

... no doubt we shall hear of little Miss H—— singing away as a prodigy, and in a few years the voice, health, and strength will all be gone, and probably the poor little life itself have been worn out of its fragile case. Stupid barbarian! After rehearsal drove to Bannisters.... In the evening, at the theater, the play was "The Provoked Husband." The house was very full; I played fairly well. I was rather tired, and Lady Townley's bones ached, for I had been taking a rowing lesson from ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... said the Princess Mistchenka with a shrug. "I am not a barbarian to leave you to a firing squad, ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... sufficient. Are we then to wonder that the regular drama does not pay?' . . . OUR readers will remember the order given by the Chinese Emperor to a corps of Mandarins, who were to exterminate the 'barbarian Englishers' in the harbor of Canton, by going down to the bank of the river in the night, and then and there 'dive straight on board those foreign ships, and put every soul of them to death!' Subsequently however ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one's self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... savage band, kicked the blazing brands to right and left, and with a stroke of his knife released the imperilled captive. It was Molang himself. An Indian who retained some instincts of humanity had informed him of what was on foot. The French commander reprimanded his barbarian associates severely, and led the prisoner away, keeping him by his side until he was able to transfer him to the care of the gigantic Indian who had ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... we feel that the childhood of Mill could hardly have been a happy one. The joy of physical achievement, the free-hearted abandonment of the young barbarian at his play, the power to do as well as to know—these are the birthright of every child. But while we may pity him for his lack of these joys, we dare not forget that to have lived the life or done the work of John Stuart Mill is no small thing. ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... uncle of successive barbarian kings of Wu, whose ancestors, however, were the same ancestors as the orthodox imperial rulers of the Chou dynasty; contemporary ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... come for Sparta; let us stay for Greece; let us vanquish the foe as we have already vanquished our friends; let this arrogant barbarian learn that nothing is so difficult as to cut an armed Spartan down. For my part, I am glad the rest have gone; they have left Thermopylae for us; there will now be nothing to mingle or compare itself with our valour; no Spartan will be hidden in ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... characteristic and complex. Judged with this strictness, which in literary art is elementary, how much of the best modern sculpture is abstract, symbolic, purely typical. What insipid fragments most of the really eminent Institute statues would make were their heads knocked off by some band of modern barbarian invaders. In the event of such an irruption, would there be any torsos left from which future Poussins could learn all they should know of the human form? Would there be any disjecta membra from which skilled anatomists could reconstruct the lost ensemble, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... which thirteen African Lions and twenty-two Barbarian Prisoners will war with each other until all ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... a healthy barbarian," said a pale young man with a monocle; "if it had been a high-browed child of culture like you, Reggie, with a taste for exotic sensations, I should hardly have ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... in the best lights, and in some lights totally and hopelessly invisible, ignored, non-existant. Now the Renaissance architects, and our modern ones, despise the simple expedient of the rough Roman or barbarian. They do not care to be understood. They care only to speak finely, and be thought great orators, if one could only hear them. So I leave you to choose between the old men, who took minutes to tell ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... what object all this wealth and power? What memory shall I leave? What family shall I found? Not a relative in the world, except a solitary barbarian, from whom when, years ago I visited him as a stranger I ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... all. Knowing that it is easier to convert the children than their elders, the Government of Nicholas I, out-Heroding Herod, inaugurated a system so cruel as to fill with terror and pity the heart of the most ferocious barbarian. Infants were torn from their mothers, boys of the age of twelve, sometimes of ten and eight, were herded like cattle, sent to distant parts of Russia, and there distributed as chattels among the officers ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... avail thee, unfortunate man; else were there an end of human institutions. The difference of which thou speakest is a simple consequence of the rights of property; and even the barbarian admits the sacred duty of respecting that ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... was sent in chains to Rome, and his brother executed, both falsely charged with conspiracy. Such were the triumphs adjudged to Batavian auxiliaries. He escaped with life, and was disposed to consecrate what remained of it to a nobler cause. Civilis was no barbarian. Like the German hero Arminius, he had received a Roman education, and had learned the degraded condition of Rome. He knew the infamous vices of her rulers; he retained an unconquerable love for liberty and for his own race. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... from the Persians? Good! then the end is near. Do they seek help from the enemy? From the barbarian, the Macedonian, who lies above us like a lion on a hill. Go, Nicias, and say, 'Pericles is dying.' And ask them to choose the worthiest as his successor! Not the most unworthy! Go, Nicias, but ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... from the Pagan past; and a debased echo at that. Debased, for if Adams could have stood in the Agora of Athens and told his tale of horror and truth, could Demosthenes have taken up the story; could Leopold the Barbarian have been a king in those days, and have done in those days, under the mandate of a deluded Greece, what he has done under the mandate of a deluded England; what a living spirit would have run through Athens like a torch, how the phalanxes ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... and their allies, as the two armies came into touch, halted, and threw up an entrenchment, just as all barbarian leaders do to-day, whenever they encamp, finding no difficulty in the work because of the vast numbers at their command, and knowing that cavalry may easily be thrown into confusion and become unmanageable, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... forced to go, you old barbarian!" cried Martha, as she heard Monsieur Claes put Mulquinier at ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... the law of nature."—Cicero, Tusc., q. 1, p. 299. "In such a quarreling and tumult and gangling, you may see this one thing by common consent, acknowledged law and speech, that there is one God, the king and father of all, and many gods the children of God. This the Greek says; and this the Barbarian says; the inhabitant of the continent and the Islander, the wise and the unwise do say the same."—Max. Tyn., Dis. 1, p. 5. "It is an ancient saying and running in the race of all men, that from God ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various

... its smiles and godlike expression the furnace that so often glows within the heart, and the volcano that consumes our happiness. For centuries, the Turk and the Moor rendered it unsafe for the European to navigate these smiling coasts; and when the barbarian's power temporarily ceased, it was merely to give place to the struggles of those who drove ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Thirteen hundred years[235] Of wealth and glory turned to dust and tears; And every monument the stranger meets, Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets; And even the Lion all subdued appears,[236] And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum, 20 With dull and daily dissonance, repeats The echo of thy Tyrant's voice along The soft waves, once all musical to song, That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng Of gondolas[237]—and to the busy hum Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... element in 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 ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... against the Pagans. What further? He liberated all the prisoners; made the poor rich; clothed the naked; reconciled the disaffected; bestowed honours on the disinherited; preferred the most experienced to the best commands; making friends of enemies, and associating both the civilized and the barbarian in the war of Spain, uniting them through the favour of God in the bond of love. Then did I, Turpin, absolve them from their sins, and give them ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... Laws." Yes, it is war, but war such as Attila would not have carried on if he had subscribed to certain stipulations; for, in subscribing them, he would have awakened to the notion, which alone distinguishes the civilized man from the barbarian, distinguishes a nation from a horde—respect for the word once given. Yes, it is war, but war the theory of which could only be made up by such pedant megalomaniacs as the Julius von Hartmanns, the Bernhardis, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... The scalplock of an Apache brave has more style. When an Indian squaw comes into a frontier settlement the first "marked-down" article she purchases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct as to the eternal fitness of things tells her that its proper place is on the skull of a barbarian. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... and warlike propensities of the native tribes are indeed formidable but not insuperable difficulties in the way of their elevation. The wildest of them may compare not unfavorably with those Northern barbarian hordes that swooped down upon Christian Europe, and who were so soon the docile pupils and proselytes of the peoples they had conquered. The Arapahoes and Camanches of our day are no further removed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... is a shame for an Eastern to refuse a challenge from any man whom he calls barbarian, and if he did so it might cost him his life afterwards at the hands of the Great King. Also if he should fall there are others to take his command, but none who can wipe away the ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... 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 present ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... massacre went over in a boat to Point Quartel. Some of the Chickasaw Indians, who also had escaped, met a Spaniard, cut off his head and presented it to Oglethorpe. With abhorence he rejected it, calling them barbarian dogs and bidding them begone. As might be expected, the Chickasaws were offended and deserted him. A party of Creeks brought four Spanish prisoners to Oglethorpe, who informed him that St. Augustine had been ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... 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 ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... Idris, and Plinlimmon, gives to wild Wales that romantic beauty for which it is so justly celebrated. That mountain region, too, guarded by the strong arms and undaunted hearts of its heroic sons, formed an impassable bulwark against the advance of barbarian invaders, and remained for many years, while Saxon England was yet pagan, the main refuge of that Christian religion to which Britain owes its present greatness. Yet subsequently, on account of the inaccessible nature of the country, the inhabitants, separated from their more enlightened fellow-subjects, ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston

... that no Biblical chronicler records any invasion of Judah and Benjamin by the Scythians, and yet that the early Oracles of Jeremiah, generally attributed to the alarms which the advance of such barbarian hordes would excite in Judah, do closely fit the Scythians (with a few exceptions that may be due to the prophet's adaptation in 604 of his earlier Oracles to the new enemy out of the north, ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... Self-control increases necessarily, and lines of conduct deemed right by a solitary savage unit come more and more under the sway of social inhibition, for although the primitive savages must inhibit individualistic action to some degree, the barbarian must suppress much more of his purely personal wishes for the purpose of social solidarity. Thus it comes about that a barbarous community can number thousands, while a tribe of savages with a higher degree of individualism and ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... emperors, became rapidly degenerate; and when Tacitus wrote, ninety years after Christ, they were already looked on as less brave than the Frisons and the other peoples beyond the Rhine. A century and a half later saw them confounded with the Gauls; and the barbarian conquerors said that "they were not a ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... 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 ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... my own situation riveted me to the place where I stood, deprived of all sense and reflection; so that I did not make the least attempt either to run away or deprecate the wrath of this barbarian, who snapped a second pistol at me; but, before he had time to prime again, perceiving a company of horsemen coming up, he rode off, and left me standing motionless as a statue, in which posture I was found by those whose appearance had saved my life. ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... provinces to accept the Spanish offers. The States of Hainault had declared that they would not undertake anything contrary to the common cause, but wanted only to preserve their existence, to "maintain the Pacification of Ghent against an insolent and barbarian tyranny worse than the Spanish" and "to prevent the extinction of their holy faith and religion, of the nobility and of all order and state." They did not abandon any of their old claims against Spain, but they refused to acknowledge the social and religious transformation ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... almost as well—Cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in her empty house; Aileen Butler, his mistress; his doddering and eternally amazed old father; his old-fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; Stener, the City Treasurer, a dish-rag in the face of danger; old Edward Malia Butler, that barbarian in a boiled shirt, with his Homeric hatred and his broken heart. Particularly old Butler. The years pass and he must be killed and put away, but not many readers of the book, I take it, will soon forget him. Dreiser is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men. In their tragic helplessness ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... was a bit taken aback by this sudden proposition. In the highly cosmopolitan circle that she was used to entertaining, she so far had encountered no savages, and, in common with most young people, she thought of "Brant" as a fierce barbarian who,—her father's letter notwithstanding,—probably carried a tomahawk and would dance a war dance in the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... Alani and certain other Gothic nations to form an alliance with them; and from that time on it was their fortune to suffer at the hand of Alaric and Attila those things which have been told in the previous narrative.[1] And in proportion as the barbarian element among them became strong, just so did the prestige of the Roman soldiers forthwith decline, and under the fair name of alliance they were more and more tyrannized over by the intruders and oppressed by them; so that the barbarians ruthlessly ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius

... reverent consideration the name of a great American philanthropist—Cornelius Vanderbilt. Personally he was a disgusting brute; ignorant, base, a boor in his manners, a blackguard in his language; he had little if any natural affection, and to those who offended him he was a relentless barbarian. Yet the man was a great philanthropist, and became so by the piling up of millions of dollars. Of course he did that for his own vulgar satisfaction, though personally he could not use the money when he had it; no matter, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... uncontaminated in this respect, than that corruptions should gradually and stealthily have mingled themselves with the simplicity of Gospel worship. That tendency is plainly evinced by the history of every nation under heaven: Greek and Barbarian, Egyptian and Scythian, would have their gods many, and their lords many. From one they would look for one good; on another they would depend for a different benefit, in mind, body, and estate. Some were of the highest grade, and to be worshipped ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler

... that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far as it has not grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the direct development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels are to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... their forces, met him while on his march; passing through every place Without molestation, his allies receiving him courteously, and escorting him as he passed the boundaries of each district. Indibilis, who spoke for both, addressed him by no means stupidly and imprudently like a barbarian, but with a modest gravity, rather excusing the change as necessary, than glorying that the present opportunity had been eagerly seized as the first which had occurred. "For he well knew," he said, "that ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... 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 ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... and all his commands so executed; yea, even in the war, as I have heard, and in his marches, most of his charges and directions given by signs, and with silence: an exquisite art! and I am heartily ashamed, and angry oftentimes, that the princes of Christendom should suffer a barbarian to transcend them in so high a point of felicity. I will practise it hereafter. [A HORN WINDED WITHIN.] —How now? oh! oh! what villain, what prodigy of mankind is that? look. [EXIT MUTE.] —[HORN AGAIN.] —Oh! cut his throat, cut his throat! ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson

... favors and patronage generously. The elder Bromly girl was wearing her lace veil, another had possession of her handkerchief, and a third displayed the rose which had adorned her left ear, things of which the master was obliged to take note with a view of returning them to the prodigal little barbarian at the close of school. Later he was, however, much perplexed by the mysterious passage under the desks of some unknown object which apparently was making the circuit of the school. With the annoyed consciousness ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... forefathers, and break away from the squalor and precarious existence which has held so many generations of them in thrall. Mr. Smith's idea is worthy the attention of legislators. It does not look so grand on paper, we admit, but it is a nobler thing to educate the young barbarian at home than to make war upon the unoffending barbarian abroad. The instincts and habits which have been transmitted from father to son for hundreds of years are not, of course, to be eradicated in a day, or even in a generation; ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... the young monks, who in increasing numbers flocked to him, and organized the monastic life upon a fixed method or rule, which he himself conscientiously observed. His power over the hearts and the veneration in which he was held is illustrated by the visit of Jotila, in 542, the barbarian king, the victor of the Romans and master of Italy, who threw himself on his face before the saint, accepted his reproof and exhortations, asked his blessing, and left a better man, but fell, after ten years' reign, as Benedict had predicted, in a great battle with ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... the motto written upon the front of the temple. What would have happened to that society if left to itself for another hundred years no man can guess. It was rescued by the two great regenerators of mankind, new land and war. The dispersion came, as Emerson said of the barbarian conquests of Rome, not a day too soon. It happened that the country at large stood in need of New England as much as New England stood in need of the country. This congested virtue, in order to be saved, must be scattered. This ferment, in order to be kept wholesome, must be ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... even uglier thing would be seen. The English aristocracy would have been absorbed by foreign adventurers. The grandchildren of these slaves and mercenaries would be holding the highest offices in the state and the army, naming themselves after the masters who had freed them, or disguising their barbarian names by English endings. The De Fung-Chowvilles would be Dukes, the Little- grizzly-bear-Joe-Smiths Earls, and the Fitz-Stanleysons, descended from a king of the gipsies who enlisted to avoid transportation, and in due time became Commander-in-Chief, would rule at Knowsley in place of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... Constantine, and surrounds him with Greek nurse and servants. Her famous progress southward, the most eccentric pageant in history, is typical of Patiomkin's regime. This extraordinary man—mountebank, writes the English envoy, "esprit reveur," says the keener-eyed Prince de Ligne—a barbarian, of terrific appearance; fantastic beyond the verge of madness, acquired a greater influence with Catharine than any other man of her reign. He had been created "Prince of Taurida" (the Crimea) ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... and tried to gain influence over him, and frankly suggested the measures to be adopted, and Dionysius listened at first to his wise counsels. Dion wished to make Syracuse a free city, with good laws, to expel the Carthaginians from Sicily, and replant the semi-barbarian Hellenic cities. He also endeavored to reform the life of Dionysius as well as Syracuse, and actually wrought a signal change in his royal pupil, so that he desired to see and converse with the great sage who had so completely changed the life of Dion, and inspired him with patriotic enthusiasm. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... ancient glories of the Capitol, has been since erected by the Christian Pontiffs, who, deriving their claim of universal dominion from an humble fisherman of Galilee, have succeeded to the throne of the Caesars, given laws to the barbarian conquerors of Rome, and extended their spiritual jurisdiction from the coast of the Baltic to the shores of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere assumption that they contained no truth,—belief still called barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different paths, as near to some one point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning, also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs-down" and let her put it out of its agony altogether—in such an age ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... Fabien, my young friend, you who still see life through fairy-tales, doubtless you imagine her happy in her lot—wealthy, spoiled, flattered, speaking with disdainful lips at nightfall, on the terrace of her villa among the great pines, of the barbarian from across the Alps who painted her portrait twenty years since; and, in the same sentence, of her—last new ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... not possible, most excellent sir, nor was it a thing endurable to the descendants of the Grecians, that they should be deprived any longer of those imprescriptible rights which belong to the inheritance of their birth—rights which a barbarian of a foreign soil, an anti- christian tyrant, issuing from the depths of Asia, seized upon with a robber's hand, and, lawlessly trampling under foot, administered up to this time the affairs of Greece, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... advancing, took the proboscis of his elephant, and turning it against the rider, struck him repeatedly with the extremity of it on either side of the head, until I at length dismounted him. Nothing could equal the rage of the barbarian finding himself thrown from his elephant. He rose in a fit of despair, and rushed against my steed and myself: but I scorned to fight him at so great a disadvantage on his side, and directly dismounted to fight him hand to hand. Never did I fight with any ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... the ill-fated Boys ever created Young Jack was the wretchedest lad: An emphatic, erratic, Dogmatic fanatic Was foisted upon him as dad! From the time he could walk, And before he could talk, His wearisome training began, On a highly barbarian, Disciplinarian, ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... that second day of May, 1052, that my story opens, at the House of Hilda, the reputed Morthwyrtha. It stood upon a gentle and verdant height; and, even through all the barbarous mutilation it had undergone from barbarian hands, enough was left strikingly to contrast the ordinary ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... it has ever been thought so. Who had dared to propose the adoption of Persian or Egyptian in Greece—how had Pericles thundered at the barbarian? How had Cato scourged from the forum him who would have given the Attic or Gallic speech to men of Rome? How proudly and how nobly Germany stopped "the incipient creeping" progress of French! And no sooner had she succeeded than her genius, which had tossed ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... best. The barbarian people are kind and clean. They have blue eyes. There is one, with marigold curls and a crisp beard, who has brought up water and logs of wood. There are two maidens, with hair like a wheat-field and rough red fingers. There are others.... I know ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... not now? Has not the man got 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. ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes

... struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave—this faith is NOT that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his God and Christianity, it is much rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason—a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason, which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow. ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... accomplished that end; and desiring to conciliate the Senatorial party at Rome, he called Boetius from his studious retirement, as one who by his position and wealth could reconcile his countrymen to the rule of a barbarian chief. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... ill of him. As I have often been told, I am myself more than half a barbarian when correct manners are concerned. But if I intruded ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... extraordinary how close the primitive barbarian is to the most civilised man. No one could have been more carefully trained than Lord Alfred Blakeney. No one possessed more of that suave self-control which distinguishes a man of the governing classes ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... day will train their sons in schools of Agriculture, Architecture, Chemistry, Mineralogy, &c., inspiring each to win fame and rank for himself by signal and brilliant usefulness, instead of resting upon and wearing out the fame won by some ancestor on the battle-field of the old barbarian time. Even To-Day's hollow pageant is an augury of this. It is Browning, I ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... culture shapes and develops this crude instrument until it becomes more suitable for his purpose. But in the course of time man often finds that he can make something new which is better than anything in nature or naturally produced. The savage discovers. The barbarian improves. The civilized man invents. The first finds. The ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... sleeps 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 and ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka

... having drawn a distinction between the Romish Church and the Romish Curia, and repudiated the latter with its demands. As for the Romanists, who made the two identical, they looked on a German as a simple fool, a lubberhead, a dolt, a barbarian, a beast, and yet they laughed at him for letting himself be fleeced and pulled by the nose. Luther's words were now re-echoed in louder tones by Hutten, whose own wish, moreover, was to incite his fellow-countrymen, as such, to rise and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... a mixture of pride and severity: "I do not wish to pass for a barbarian, as they call us, with these civilized people; therefore I glory in ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... of the Red River, which is half overarched by the huge trees that incline forward over its waters from either bank. What a contrast to the Mississippi, which flows along, broad, powerful, and majestic, like some barbarian conqueror bursting forth at the head of his stinking hordes to overrun half a world! The Red River on the other hand, which we are accustomed to call the Nile of Louisiana—with about as much right and propriety as the Massachusetts cobbler who christened his son Alexander Caesar Napoleon—sneaks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... the Greeks. I should like to have been a Greek and fought the Persians, and then have come home and have written tragedies, or else have been listened to by everybody for my wisdom, like Socrates, and have died a grand death." (Philip, you perceive, was not without a wish to impress the well-made barbarian with a ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... Germany was not using the methods of fighting that could be countenanced by a civilized nation. As the nation stood behind its army in all this barbarism, there must be something inherently lacking in it despite its wonderful music, its divine poetry, its record in the sciences. It, too, must be barbarian at heart. We agreed that if it should win this war it would be very uncomfortable to belong to one of the allied nations, or even to live in the world at all, since it was certain German manners and German methods would not improve with victory. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... was slain, but with heaps upon heaps of dead Persians round them, so that, when Xerxes looked at the spot, he asked in horror whether all the Greeks were like these, and how many more Spartans there were. Like a barbarian, he had Leonidas' body hung on a cross; but in after times the brave king's bones were buried on the spot, and a mound raised over the other warriors, with the ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the south. Nevertheless the undertaking proved a failure: on this occasion at least the Hellenic superiority in the art of war, and the bravery of the tyrant Aristodemus, succeeded in repelling the barbarian assault on the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... forced his sons, who might have claimed their parental heritage, and have again imposed the abhorred yoke upon them, into a monastery, the town had never known any prosperous times. One after another the shops closed, and money became as scarce as if there had been an invasion of barbarian hordes, who had emptied the State treasury, and stolen ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... represents the Burmese Government as a barbarian Government. He says they have sacrificed all who assisted us, and that the difficulty in retroceding the Tenasserim provinces would be to know what to do with the 35,000 people who ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)

... was desirous, if I could, to be of service to the republic even before the first of January. For, as to your question, how I had returned; in the first place, I returned by daylight, not in the dark; in the second place, I returned in shoes, and in my Roman gown, not in any Gallic slippers, or barbarian mantle. And even now you keep looking at me; and, as it seems, with great anger. Surely you would be reconciled to me if you knew how ashamed I am of your worthlessness, which you yourself are not ashamed of. Of all the profligate conduct of all the world, I never saw, I never ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... spectacles, I made inquiries concerning the pleasures of this independence. They liked it—indeed they did. 'Twas the natural fate of almost all girls—the recognized custom in America—and I was a barbarian not to see ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling

... is so thoroughly and characteristically German, that at first sight it may be thought surprising that it should have succeeded so well in a city like Vienna, which was inclined to look upon the Singspiel as a barbarian product of Northern Germany. But there is a reason for this, and it is one which goes to the root of the whole question of comic opera. Mozart saw that Italian comic operas often succeeded in spite of miserable libretti, because the entire interest ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... acute stress and strain, the adrenals in modern life are called upon to function more heavily and frequently than in the past. As a matter of fact, the life of the beast of jungle and field, as well as of savage and barbarian, is just as full of emergencies and shocks as that of the average city man or woman. In the case of the latter, however, inhibitions, education, and the conditions of modern living, improper food, sedentary indoor confinement, and universal rack and noise, have undoubtedly made greater and greater ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... "Now where have you barbarian lived," they reply, "never to have heard of the Rhine-gold?" They mock his ignorance; returning to their teasing mood, they invite him to come and revel with them in ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... the story of the conquest of Northern Italy by the Lombards under Alboin, in 568, hardly differs materially from that of the inroads of other barbarian tribes of the north on the fertile plains of Italy. The causes were the same. Where the distinction is to be found from other such invasions, is in the results of the Lombard occupation, and in the ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams

... cried the king. "His judgment is right; but you, noble knight, will help us in the campaign against the barbarian hordes and will be the leader of the detachment which the fair duchess ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various

... majority to the minority. Their position, as we said at the outset, was fundamentally aristocratic; they exaggerated rather than minimised the distinctions between men—between the Greek and the barbarian, the freeman and the slave, the gentleman and the artisan—regarding them as natural and fundamental, not as the casual product of circumstances. The "equality" which they sought in a well-ordered state was proportional not arithmetical—the attribution to each of his peculiar ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... accordingly heaped up mounds against the fortifications and brought their engines to bear: then collecting in a dense force they repulsed all sallying parties and with their slings and arrows kept back all the defenders of the wall. Many persons that had been sent by some of the barbarian kings they kept prisoners. The Jews who came to the assistance of their countrymen were many of them from the immediate region and many from kindred districts, not only in this same Roman empire but from beyond the Euphrates, and they, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio

... commercial interests. This time, we were out to play the knight; to save the smaller peoples; to rescue our once "sweet enemy," fair France. Russia was the disturbing thought. It somewhat discounted the knight-errant idea, riding stirrup to stirrup beside that barbarian horseman. But there were possibilities about Russia. Idealism lay hid within that sleeping brain. It would be a holy war for the Kingdom of the Peoples. With Germany freed from the monster of blood and iron that was crushing ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... a tradition that the barbarian queen, Tomyris, enraged that Cyrus had overcome her son by deceit, dipped the slain king's head in a skin-bag of blood, exclaiming, "Drink thy fill of blood, of which thou couldst not ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... lagoons, 6 m. N.E. of Venice by sea. Pop. (1901) 8169. It is a fishing town, with a large royal school of lace-making employing some 500 girls. It was founded, like all the towns in the lagoons, by fugitives from the mainland cities at the time of the barbarian invasions. Torcello is a part ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... that Spain was once the place where barbarian Europe came to light her lamp. Seven hundred years before there was a public lamp in London you might have gone through the streets of Cordova amid ten miles of lighted lamps, and stood there on solidly paved land, when hundreds ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... fertile; Patrae; Pylos, rul'd By Neleus; Troezen, yet unus'd to own The sway of Pittheus; Cleona the low; And all those towns the two-sea'd isthmus holds; And all those towns the isthmus views without. Athens, incredible! was absent sole. War all her energy demanded. Borne O'er ocean, fierce barbarian troops, the walls Mopsopian threaten'd. Thracian Tereus, these With arms auxiliar routed; bright his name Shone from the conquest. Him in riches great, Mighty in power, and from the god-like Mars, His lineage tracing, Procne's nuptial hand Close to Pandion bound. Their marriage bed Nor ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... {BUAF}, over-used or cliched {sig quote}s, ugly {ASCII art}, or simply excessive size. The original 'Warlord' was a {BIFF}-like {newbie} c.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie; the group name alt.fan.warlord was sarcasm, and the characteristic mode of warlording is devastatingly ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... inhabitants, beheld the massacre from an aperture which afforded him a view of the area of the fort. He describes it as follows: "I beheld, in shapes the foulest and most terrible, the ferocious triumphs of barbarian conquerors. The dead were scalped and mangled; the dying were writhing and shrieking under the insatiated knife and tomahawk, and from the bodies of some, ripped open, their butchers were drinking the blood scooped up in the ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... to be three points of attack. Cimber, to judge from Cicero's invective, was suspected of having risen from servile parentage, and of trying, as freedmen then frequently did, to pass as a descendant of some unfortunate barbarian prince. Since his brogue was Celtic (tau Gallicum) he could readily make a plausible story of being British. Vergil seems to imply that the brogue as well as the name Cimber had been assumed to hide his Asiatic parentage. The ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... lovers of mankind (and the animals) like St. Francis—(and these manifestations can hardly be claimed by the Church, which pretty consistently opposed them)—it may be said that after about the fourth century the real spirit and light of early Christian enthusiasm died away. The incursions of barbarian tribes from the North and East, and later of Moors and Arabs from the South, familiarized the European peoples with the ideas of bloodshed and violence; gross and material conceptions of life were in the ascendant; and a romantic and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... The barbarian nations at the time of their great migration in the fifth century were organized on a tribal and village basis. The head man was simply primus inter pares. In the course of their wanderings the successful military ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... contemptible in the eyes of Rome, who has no respect for a nation, save so far as it can minister to her cruelty or avarice. The Spaniard was still willing to pay, as far as his means would allow, but he was soon given to understand that he was a degraded being,— a barbarian; nay, a beggar. Now, you may draw the last cuarto from a Spaniard, provided you will concede to him the title of cavalier, and rich man, for the old leaven still works as powerfully as in the time of the first Philip; but you must never ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... substitute for the family. What is meant by school here, is that which is possessed in common by day school and boarding-school—the schoolroom and the recess playground part. It is something which the savage and the barbarian distinctively do not possess as a phase in their making, and scarcely even its rudimentary suggestion. It is a new element correlated with the establishment of a wider political order and with the ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... intellectual power. "Probe a little deeper, surgeon," said the French soldier, "and you'll find the emperor." Napoleon may have impressed himself on the soldier's intellect; he had enthroned himself in his heart. "Slave," said the old Roman, Marius, to the barbarian who had been sent into the dungeon to despatch him, "slave, wouldst thou kill Cains Marius?" And the barbarian, though backed by all the power of Rome, is said to have fled in dismay. Why did he run away? I do not know. I only know that I should have done the same. One more instance. Some thirty ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... large creek; and close under the cliff were moored seven warships, high and tall, with prows and sterns all gorgeous with gilding in the light of the splendid moon. And that rude timber house, which seemed but a chain of barbarian huts linked into one, was a land palace of Hardrada of Norway; but the true halls of his royalty, the true seats of his empire, were the decks of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... The clothes are of cotton or silk according to the grade and riches of the wearer. Buttons are a useless luxury in Cho-sen, for neither men nor women recognise their utility; on the contrary, the natives display much amusement and chaff at the stupid foreign barbarian who goes and cuts any number of buttonholes in the finest clothing, which, in their idea, is an incomprehensible mistake ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... that one of Longorio's fingers was decorated with a magnificent diamond-and-ruby ring, and this interested her queerly. No ordinary man could fittingly have worn such an ornament, yet on the hand of this splendid barbarian it seemed not at ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... usual decline. The little kingdom of the Hebrews, hardy and warlike under Saul and David, luxurious and effeminate under Solomon, lasted but little more than a hundred years. Persia, rising rapidly by military means from the barbarian state, lived a brilliant life of conquest, cultivated but little those arts of peace that hold in check the passions of a successful military nation, yielded rapidly to the seductions of luxury, and fell abruptly before the Macedonian Alexander, lasting less than two hundred and fifty ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... very broad though short dagger, called igua in that country, which is made purposely for beheading a person at one blow—a vice common to the Zambales, before they knew the sweet charity of the law which we profess. But as the stroke was first caught by the hood [of the father's habit], the barbarian did not succeed in his purpose, which had been to behead him in a moment. But the wound did not heal readily, and consequently he lived but a little while. It is said that there was no further cause for the atrocious and profane act of the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various

... found in Yoshiwara. He will find company without fail." Kakunai, as he restrained the beast, now full at ease—"Of that we are assured. Alas! He cannot squat. In that he is clumsy, as is the red haired, green-eyed western barbarian. Otherwise it is not Kakunai who would bring coin to Nakanocho[u], but convey money hence." Some agreed, and some disagreed, and all congratulated. Thus did horse and groom get much advertisement at the O[u]te-mon, to ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... Savage, "I will take my chance. Before I left England his lordship made a provision for my old mother and my widowed sister and her children, and I have none other dependent upon me. Moreover, I won't return alone with those Mazitu to become a barbarian, for how could I find my way back to the coast without anyone to guide me? So I'll go on and ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard



Words linked to "Barbarian" :   noncivilized, man-eater, headhunter, anthropophagus, Goth, primitive, Odoacer, anthropophagite, noncivilised, vandal, primitive person, unpleasant person, head-shrinker, hunter-gatherer, Odovakar, cannibal, disagreeable person, Odovacar



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