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Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life . . .

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
Respected
Citizen
Citizens
Natural
Right
Always
Life
Dispose
Civilians

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A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
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Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
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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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In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill . . .
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[In] the national and religious conflict of the [Byzantine and Saracen] empires, peace was without confidence, and war without mercy.
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Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.
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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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Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
Edward Gibbon
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So natural to man is the practice of violence that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility.
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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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[The] events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities [between Rome and Persia], undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.
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But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
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Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.
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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.
Edward Gibbon
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The subject, however various and important, has already been so frequently, so ably, and so successfully discussed, that it is now grown familiar to the reader, and difficult to the writer.
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In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.
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The progress of despotism tends to disappoint its own purpose.
Edward Gibbon
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[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.
Edward Gibbon
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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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