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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.

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
Shall
Vice
War
Liberal
History
Vices
Benefactors
Character
Continue
Bestow
Ever
Characters
Destroyers
Long
Glory
Exalted
Mankind
Applause
Military
Thirst

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History has scarcely deigned to notice [Libius Severus's] birth, his elevation, his character, or his death.
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[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.
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It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
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The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
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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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A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt [of the defendant] was presumed by the judges [due to the nature of the charge], and paederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.
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Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.
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[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.
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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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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.
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[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.
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The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.
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[The] events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities [between Rome and Persia], undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.
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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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Our toil is lessened, and our wealth is increased, by our dominion over the useful animals . . .
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The frequent repetition of miracles serves to provoke, where it does not subdue, the reason of mankind.
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In everyage and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, ofthetwosexes, hasusurped thepowers ofthe state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.
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Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life . . .
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The subject, however various and important, has already been so frequently, so ably, and so successfully discussed, that it is now grown familiar to the reader, and difficult to the writer.
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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.
Edward Gibbon