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To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.

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
Life
University
Cheerfully
Spent
Oxford
Son
Renounce
Months
Fourteen
College
Proved
Willing
Idle
Mother
Acknowledge
Disclaim
Whole
Obligation
Unprofitable

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Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
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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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I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.
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But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.
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To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
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[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.
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But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .
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A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice his profusion, of liberality his obstinacy, of firmness.
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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 primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events
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Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.
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[Courage] arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength . . .
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The pains and pleasures of the body, howsoever important to ourselves, are an indelicate subject of conversation
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A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.
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Active valour may often be the present of nature but such patient diligence can be the fruit only of habit and discipline.
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It was [Totila's] constant theme, that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish.
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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] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.
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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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All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
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