A Quote by Oscar Wilde

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Oscar Wilde

Quote Topics

America Barbarism Between Civilization Country Decadence Only Without

Quote Author

Oscar Wilde
Irish - Poet
October 16, 1854 - November 30, 1900

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

John O'Hara

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

Georges Clemenceau

Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization.

Rosa Luxemburg

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Will Durant

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

Alistair Cooke

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

Robert Green Ingersoll

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.

Neil Gaiman

What a vast difference there is between the barbarism that precedes culture and the barbarism that follows it.

Christian Friedrich Hebbel

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

C. S. Lewis

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Cyril Connolly

I do not believe I am exaggerating in affirming that the empire of Russia is a country whose inhabitants are the most miserable on earth, because they suffer at one and the same time the evils of barbarism and of civilization.

Marquis De Custine

The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.

Alva Myrdal

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.