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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.

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
May
Thousand
Height
Enlarge
Human
Changed
Originals
Barbarism
Humans
Four
Original
Apprehension
Years
Face
Determine
Safely
People
Faces
Towards
Advances
Experience
Perfection
Diminish
Apprehensions
Nature
Species
Aspire
Relapse
Cannot
Unless
Hopes
Presumed

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Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.
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But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
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A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.
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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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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 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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The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
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[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.
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[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .
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Constantinople was the principal seat and fortress of Arianism and, in a long interval of forty years, the faith of the princes and prelates who reigned in the capital of the East was rejected in the purer schools of Rome and Alexandria.
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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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A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.
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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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According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
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Style is the image of character.
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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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Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.
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In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.
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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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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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