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Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. — Edward Gibbon · 1789The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. — Edward Gibbon · 1789Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery. — Edward Gibbon · 1781All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance. — Edward Gibbon · 1789Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave. — Edward Gibbon · 1789Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind. — Edward Gibbon · 1776All 16 quotes →
The abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life. — Edward Gibbon · 1794It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. — Edward Gibbon · 1794