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The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilised people to an improved country.

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
Improved
Pledge
Enjoyment
Possession
Property
History
Pledges
Country
Civilised
People
Bind

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Style is the image of character.
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History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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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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The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.
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But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .
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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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Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence.
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[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
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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.
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Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.
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In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill . . .
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Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Mahomet each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage.
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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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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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I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.
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Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
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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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Yet the arts of Severus cannot be justified by the most ample privileges of state reason. He promised only to betray he flattered only to ruin and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation.
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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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Philosophy alone can boast (and perhaps it is no more than the boast of philosophy), that her gentle hand is able to eradicate from the human mind the latent and deadly principle of fanaticism.
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