"The barbarian is...not only at our gates; he is always within the walls of our civilization, inside our minds and our hearts. In times of storm and stress within any society, his appeal is very strong. He offers immediate satisfaction of the simple instincts, love, hatred, and anger. He offers to help us to forget our own unhappiness by making other people still more unhappy. He shows us how we may forget our sense of frustration and the intolerable burden of responsibility in blind obedience, the beating of tom-toms, and the shouting of slogans. He gives us the simple satisfaction of violence and destruction, the destruction of society, of the complicated network of rules and regulations, standards and morality which constitute civilization and which all of us feel entangling, frustrating, choking our animal instincts and desires."
Leonard Woolf

January 1, 1970

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

Ch. 2 (pp. 65-66)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonard_Woolf