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The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind.

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
Still
Limits
Disciple
Epicurus
Human
Authority
Systems
Reigned
Humans
Exercise
Attempt
Deference
Every
Generations
Generous
Transmitted
Mind
Growth
Schools
Enlarge
Another
Powers
Aristotle
Stills
Generation
Disciples
Zeno
School
Blind
Plato
Precluded

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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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But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
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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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If we are more affected by the ruin of a palace than by the conflagration of a cottage, our humanity must have formed a very erroneous estimate of the miseries of human life.
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Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
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Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
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History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom.
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Such events may be disbelieved or disregarded but the charity of a bishop, Acacius of Amida, whose name might have dignified the saintly calendar, shall not be lost in oblivion.
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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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Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty, was successfully practised honours, gifts, and immunities were offered and accepted as the price of an episcopal vote and the condemnation of the Alexandrian primate was artfully represented as the only measure which could restore the peace and union of the catholic church.
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Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.
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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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I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
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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.
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A Locrian, who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.
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The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
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It is impossible to reduce, or, at least, to hold a distant country against the wishes and efforts of its inhabitants.
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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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A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages.
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The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader.
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