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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.

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
Stranger
Mankind
Rest
Enemy
Ideas
Confound
Arabs
Accustomed
Separation

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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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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 progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.
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[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage.
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Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers the second, more personal and important, from himself.
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War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
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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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Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.
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Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.
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Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.
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Such events may be disbelieved or disregarded but the charity of a bishop, Acacius of Amida, whose name might have dignified the saintly calendar, shall not be lost in oblivion.
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The Gauls derided the hairy and gigantic savages of the North their rustic manners, dissonant joy, voracious appetite, and their horrid appearance, equally disgusting to the sight and to the smell.
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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 criminal penalties [for suicide] are the production of a later and darker age.
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The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
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[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .
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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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[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.
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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.
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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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