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

— Leonard Woolf Barbarians Within and Without (1939)

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More quotes by Leonard Woolf

Nothing matters, and everything matters.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than to their class privileges and vested interests except perhaps to their illusions.

No people has ever despised and distrusted the intellect and intellectuals more than the British.

There is always some contempt in pity. One pities poor old Oedipus, but one doesn't pity Job.

The Wise Virgins (1914)

In the timbre of a woman's voice, when it is beautiful, there seem to be mysteriously harmonised all the desires and enchantments both of the spirit and the body.

The Wise Virgins (1914)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Leonard Woolf (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.