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Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.
Edward Gibbon
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Edward Gibbon
Age: 56 †
Born: 1737
Born: May 8
Died: 1794
Died: January 16
Classical Scholar
Historian
Politician
Writer
Gibbon
Symptom
Infallible
Constitutional
Symptoms
Corruption
Liberty
Infallibility
More quotes by Edward Gibbon
A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life.
Edward Gibbon
[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.
Edward Gibbon
In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.
Edward Gibbon
Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.
Edward Gibbon
This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle.
Edward Gibbon
It was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals but the primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity.
Edward Gibbon
The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events
Edward Gibbon
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
Edward Gibbon
The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.
Edward Gibbon
There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
Edward Gibbon
The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.
Edward Gibbon
The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passion, of the Syrians: the most skilful artists were procured form the adjacent cities a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness, and as the glory, of Antioch.
Edward Gibbon
[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.
Edward Gibbon
The pains and pleasures of the body, howsoever important to ourselves, are an indelicate subject of conversation
Edward Gibbon
[The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
Edward Gibbon
It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.
Edward Gibbon
The most distinguished merit of those two officers was their respective prowess, of the one in the combats of Bacchus, of the other in those of Venus.
Edward Gibbon
[The] penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety.
Edward Gibbon
According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
Edward Gibbon
I darted a contemptuous look at the stately models of superstition.
Edward Gibbon