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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
Manly
Monk
Reign
Oppressed
Virtues
Virtue
Pusillanimous
Servile
Monks

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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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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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Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had improved the science of government and war.
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While the Romans languished under the ignominious tyranny of eunuchs and bishops, the praises of Julian were repeated with transport in every part of the empire, except in the palace of Constantius.
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In everyage and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, ofthetwosexes, hasusurped thepowers ofthe state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.
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But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
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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.
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It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.
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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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Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition.
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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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Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
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There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
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Language is the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind.
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[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
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History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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As for this young Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as he shows himself, now and always afterwards full of affection, of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him brave as a lion yet with a grace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood.
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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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Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
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Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
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