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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.

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
Less
Effusion
War
Prelates
History
Contending
Without
Owing
Much
Moderation
Carried
Weakness
Blood

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Our toil is lessened, and our wealth is increased, by our dominion over the useful animals . . .
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Style is the image of character.
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History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.
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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.
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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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A reformer should be exempt from the suspicion of interest, and he must possess the confidence and esteem of those whom he proposes to reclaim.
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My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
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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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History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom.
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History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes 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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Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.
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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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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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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 two Antonines (for it is of them that we are now speaking) governed the Roman world forty-two years, with the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue. ... Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.
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[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.
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The fortune of nations has often depended on accidents . . .
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[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
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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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