Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians… and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me, so that we can move against the barbarians and liberate ourselves from the Persian bondage, for as Greeks we should not be slaves to barbarians.
Now you fear punishment and beg for your lives, so I will let you free, if not for any other reason so that you can see the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant, so do not expect to suffer any harm from me. A king does not kill messengers.
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the very mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?The barbarians are due here today.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? Those people were a kind of solution.
The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.