Life & Wisdom Quote by Hervey Allen

Hervey Allen’s line lands like a genteel insult sharpened into a thesis: history, he suggests, doesn’t glide forward on progress so much as it gets periodically stormed by people who don’t know the rules and don’t particularly care. Calling the young an “invasion of savages” borrows the language of empire and border panic, flipping it inward. The threat isn’t foreigners at the gate; it’s your own kids, arriving with new slang, new tastes, new morals, and the unnerving power to make yesterday’s sophistication look like clutter.

The intent is partly comic, partly defensive. “Each new generation” frames the cycle as inevitable, not a one-off decline. “Fresh” is doing sly work: renewal and menace in the same breath. Allen gives older readers a flattering role as the besieged custodians of “civilization,” while smuggling in an admission that what we call civilization is just a temporary truce - a set of habits held together by consensus. When that consensus breaks, it feels barbaric.

Context matters: Allen wrote in a first half of the 20th century racked by mass immigration debates, youth-driven cultural revolutions (jazz, cinema), and world wars that made “civilization” look thin. The subtext isn’t simply “kids these days.” It’s anxiety about cultural continuity in a modern world where institutions can’t metabolize change fast enough. The line works because it captures a recurring psychological truth: novelty feels like vandalism to those invested in the old order, and every “civilized” era once arrived as somebody else’s barbarian raid.