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So long as mankind shall continue to lavish more praise upon its destroyers than upon its benefactors war shall remain the chief pursuit of ambitious minds.

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
Upon
Remain
Lavish
War
Praise
Benefactors
Long
Minds
Destroyers
Mind
Continue
Users
Drug
Ambitious
Mankind
Chief
Military
Chiefs
Shall
Pursuit

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Imam Hussain's sacrifice is for all groups and communities, an example of the path of rightousness.
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We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion, that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.
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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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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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I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
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But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
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History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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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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bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.
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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.
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I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.
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Women [in ancient Rome] were condemned to the perpetual tutelage of parents, husbands, or guardians a sex created to please and obey was never supposed to have attained the age of reason and experience. Such, at least, was the stern and haughty spirit of the ancient law . . .
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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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Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.
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[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.
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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] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .
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The dark cloud, which had been cleared by the Phoenician discoveries, and finally dispelled by the arms of Caesar, again settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province [Britain] was again lost among the fabulous Islands of the Ocean.
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Style is the image of character.
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A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.
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