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Our toil is lessened, and our wealth is increased, by our dominion over the useful animals . . .

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
Wealth
Animal
Lessened
Dominion
Increased
Toil
Useful
Animals

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The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.
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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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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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History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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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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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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But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
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[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .
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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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War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
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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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Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
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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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Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.
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[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
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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 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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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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Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
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So natural to man is the practice of violence that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility.
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