A Quote by Leonard Woolf

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

Leonard Woolf

Quote Topics

Anyone Barbarian Civilized Effort Man Remain Requires Terrible

Quote Author

Leonard Woolf
British - Author
November 25, 1880 - August 14, 1969

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

Gaston Bachelard

To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

Anyone can negatively criticize - it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires.

Chuck Jones

Man...is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill- educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.

Plato

It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.

Robert Green Ingersoll

It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

Richard M. Weaver

Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.

Max McKeown

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

Thomas Sowell

It had not occurred to me that marriage requires the same effort as a career. And unlike a career, marriage requires a joint effort.

Jessica Savitch

They knew no better, but I do not propose to follow the example of a barbarian because he was honestly a barbarian.

Robert Green Ingersoll

I’ve been a barbarian my whole life. I’m just a smarter barbarian now. Evolution, you know?

Brock Lesnar

In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad

Pamela Geller

Over-sentimentality, over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.

Theodore Roosevelt

Freedom requires no effort to enjoy but requires heroic efforts to preserve.

Richard G. Scott

Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.