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[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.

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
Monk
Reign
Oppressed
Virtues
Virtue
Pusillanimous
Servile
Monks
Manly

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The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
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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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War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
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Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
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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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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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My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
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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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Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence.
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I darted a contemptuous look at the stately models of superstition.
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This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle.
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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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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.
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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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But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
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All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
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I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
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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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According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
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The value of money has been settled by general consent to express our wants and our property, as letters were invented to express our ideas and both these institutions, by giving a more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent.
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