Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
Interpretation
Civilization requires effort and self-control, whereas succumbing to barbarism is easy.
This quote by Leonard Woolf highlights the idea that maintaining civility and a moral high ground in a world that often leans towards chaos requires significant effort and discipline. It suggests that while anyone can act primitively or without thought, it takes true strength and resolve to uphold civilized behavior and values, which can be a constant struggle against our more base instincts.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of maintaining ethics in leadership.
Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
When You Hold Onto Your History, You Do It At The Expense Of Your Destiny.
We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires. _x000D_ We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ.
The past stays put, I just keep moving farther away from it.
Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.
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