Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. – Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 3 September 1855
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. – Sigmund Freud