Quotes About Gibbon

The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.

HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for The

whose one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant.]

But they had imbibed, in the first fervor of the reformation, the spirit, as well as the principles of Luther.

ingratitude, the customary reward for superior merit.

it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy. From

The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Egypt, the fruitful parent of superstition, afforded the first example of the monastic life.

I must therefore depend on the Greeks, whose prejudices, in some degree, are subdued by their distress.

whose merit is loudly celebrated by the doubtful evidence of his own applause.

Bigotry and national aversion are powerful magnifiers of every object of dispute;

The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt.

I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.

To a lover of books the shops and sales in London present irresistible temptations.

If, as Gibbon says, nothing but time - though a long time- is required for a world to perish; so nothing but time -though still more time- is required for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany.

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

Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium. Therefore it must represent a need, something more fundamental than Gibbon's 18th century enlightenment allowed for, or his elegant ironies could dispose of.

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

Gibbon's breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or in Candide, Voltaire's devastating mockery of Leibniz's claim that 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'.m

History has scarcely deigned to notice [Libius Severus's] birth, his elevation, his character, or his death.