436 Quotes by Edward Gibbon

The army is the only order of men sufficiently united to concur in the same sentiments, and powerful enough to impose them on the rest of their fellow-citizens; but the temper of soldiers, habituated at once to violence and to slavery, renders them very unfit guardians of a legal, or even a civil constitution.

Suspicious princes often promote the last of mankind from a vain persuasion, that those who have no dependence, except on their favour, will have no attachment, except to their benefactor.

Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.

Of the three popes, John the Twenty-third was the first victim: he fled and was brought back a prisoner: the most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest

Passing from the sectaries of the law itself,[the Gnostics] asserted that it was impossible that a religion which consisted only of bloody sacrifices and trifling ceremonies, and whose rewards as well as punishments were all of a carnal and temporal nature, could inspire the love of virtue, or restrain the impetuosity of passion.

The conquest of the land of Canaan was accompanied with so many wonderful and so many bloody circumstances, that the victorious Jews were left in a state of irreconcilable hostility with all their neighbours.

The descendants of Abraham were flattered by the opinion, that they alone were the heirs of the covenant, and they were apprehensive of diminishing the value of their inheritance, by sharing it too easily with the strangers of the earth.

during the long period which elapsed between the Egyptian and the Babylonian servitudes, the hopes as well as fears of the Jews appear to have been confined within the narrow compass of the present life.

if a strict obedience had been paid to the order, that every male, three times in the year, should present himself before the lord Jehovah, it would have been impossible that the Jews could ever have spread themselves beyond yhe narrow limits of the promised land. That obstacle was indeed removed by the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem.