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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
Increased
Toil
Useful
Animals
Wealth
Animal
Lessened
Dominion

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[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.
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History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom.
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The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved the peace by a constant preparation for war.
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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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But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .
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[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.
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Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.
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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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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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The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.
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It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.
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All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
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Metellus Numidicus, the censor, acknowledged to the Roman people, in a public oration, that had kind nature allowed us to exist without the help of women, we should be delivered from a very troublesome companion and he could recommend matrimony only as the sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty.
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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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In old age the consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents, who commence a new life in their children, the faith of enthusiasts, who sing hallelujahs above the clouds and the vanity of authors, who presume the immortality of their name and writings.
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The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passion, of the Syrians: the most skilful artists were procured form the adjacent cities a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness, and as the glory, of Antioch.
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To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonised would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature.
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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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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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[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
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