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It is impossible to reduce, or, at least, to hold a distant country against the wishes and efforts of its inhabitants.
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
Impossible
Effort
Inhabitants
Wish
Distant
Country
Reduce
Wishes
Efforts
Hold
Least
More quotes by Edward Gibbon
I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
Edward Gibbon
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.
Edward Gibbon
It was [Totila's] constant theme, that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish.
Edward Gibbon
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
Edward Gibbon
The separation of the Arabs from the rest of mankind has accustomed them to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy.
Edward Gibbon
When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite.
Edward Gibbon
Philosophy, with the aid of experience, has at length banished the study of alchymy and the present age, however desirous of riches, is content to seek them by the humbler means of commerce and industry.
Edward Gibbon
Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
Edward Gibbon
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.
Edward Gibbon
But the human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return by degrees to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition.
Edward Gibbon
I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.
Edward Gibbon
The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilised people to an improved country.
Edward Gibbon
But in almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians who alone had time and inclination to execute such laborious destruction.
Edward Gibbon
The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
Edward Gibbon
The Romans, who so coolly and so concisely mention the acts of justice which were exercised by the legions, reserve their compassion and their eloquence for their own sufferings, when the provinces were invaded and desolated by the arms of the successful Barbarians.
Edward Gibbon
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
Style is the image of character.
Edward Gibbon
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
In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill . . .
Edward Gibbon
