Quote

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.

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
People
Neck
Strangled
Rejected
Innovator
Necks
Cord
Stood
Cords
Round
Innovators
Rounds
Proposed
Forth
Instantly
Law
Assembly

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[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.
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It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries (aged 17).
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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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Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
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So long as mankind shall continue to lavish more praise upon its destroyers than upon its benefactors war shall remain the chief pursuit of ambitious minds.
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The patient and active virtues of a soldier are insensibly nursed in the habits and discipline of a pastoral life.
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A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages.
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But the desire of obtaining the advantages, and of escaping the burdens, of political society, is a perpetual and inexhaustible source of discord.
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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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In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.
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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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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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The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.
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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 dark cloud, which had been cleared by the Phoenician discoveries, and finally dispelled by the arms of Caesar, again settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province [Britain] was again lost among the fabulous Islands of the Ocean.
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[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .
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The separation of the Arabs from the rest of mankind has accustomed them to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy.
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[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.
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If we are more affected by the ruin of a palace than by the conflagration of a cottage, our humanity must have formed a very erroneous estimate of the miseries of human life.
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It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.
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