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Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had improved the science of government and war.

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
Primitive
Arts
Luxury
Ignorant
War
Science
Art
Romans
Government
Improved

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[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.
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The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition and may therefore deserve to be considered, as a singular event in the history of the human mind.
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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.
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History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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Amiable weaknesses of human nature.
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Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.
Edward Gibbon
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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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But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .
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[The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
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It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
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Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life . . .
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The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the council of Ravenna, he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius.
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A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice his profusion, of liberality his obstinacy, of firmness.
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The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events
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[Every age], however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown.
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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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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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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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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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The frequent repetition of miracles serves to provoke, where it does not subdue, the reason of mankind.
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