Edward Gibbon Quotes

99 quotes in 1311 categories

• 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…
• Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
• The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.
• Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
• Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.
• The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed…
• Style is the image of character.
• I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride…
• 'I believe in o­ne God and Mohammed the Apostle of God,' is the simple and invariable profession of Islam. The intellectual image of the Deity…
• So long as mankind shall continue to lavish more praise upon its destroyers than upon its benefactors war shall remain the chief pursuit of ambitious…
• The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
• In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.
• The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
• I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
• Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.
• The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.
• Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of…
• If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most…
• History, in fact, is no more than a list of the crimes of humanity, human follies and accidents
• The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied…

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