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About this quote

What does it mean?
Barbarism lasts long and spreads from art to morals if not addressed.
In plain terms
Cruelty isn't temporary; it affects culture and ethics.
What can you take from it?
Watch how cruelty spreads to ethics.

Where it applies

  • post conflict societies
  • authoritarianism
  • historical analysis

Putting it to work

  • monitor cultural decay
  • teach ethics
  • preserve humanism

Questions to consider

  • How does cruelty enter ethics?
  • Can civilization recover from barbarism?

Another view

Some barbarisms are isolated and don't spread to morals.

More from Albert Camus

  1. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believ…

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  2. Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

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  3. All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it.

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