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The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.

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
Differences
Disorder
Nice
Justify
Disorders
Age
Distinction
Partial
Others
Discover
Readily
Character
Allow
Condemn
Afraid
Station
Difference
Worthless
Mankind
Stations

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Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
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[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.
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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.
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It is seldom that minds long exercised in business have formed any habits of conversing with themselves, and in the loss of power they principally regret the want of occupation.
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In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.
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Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
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The separation of the Arabs from the rest of mankind has accustomed them to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy.
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Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.
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The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.
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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.
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The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
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The love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.
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Constantinople was the principal seat and fortress of Arianism and, in a long interval of forty years, the faith of the princes and prelates who reigned in the capital of the East was rejected in the purer schools of Rome and Alexandria.
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Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.
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[Courage] arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength . . .
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If this Punic war was carried on without any effusion of blood, it was owing much less to the moderation than to the weakness of the contending prelates.
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The history of empires is the record of human misery the history of the sciences is that of the greatness and happiness of mankind.
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[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.
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There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
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As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.
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