Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edward Gibbon

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

Edward Gibbon

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.

Edward Gibbon

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.

Edward Gibbon

The frequent repetition of miracles serves to provoke, where it does not subdue, the reason of mankind....

Edward Gibbon

An absolute monarch, who is rich without patrimony, may be charitable without merit; and Constantine too easily believed that he should purchase the favour of Heaven if he maintained the idle at the expense of the industrious, and distributed among the saints the wealth of the republic.

Edward Gibbon

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty, was successfully practised; honours, gifts, and immunities were offered and accepted as the price of an episcopal vote; and the condemnation of the Alexandrian primate was artfully represented as the only measure which could restore the peace and union of the catholic church.

Edward Gibbon

While the Romans languished under the ignominious tyranny of eunuchs and bishops, the praises of Julian were repeated with transport in every part of the empire, except in the palace of Constantius.

Edith Sitwell

[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.

David Hume

History is the discovering of the principles of human nature.

Alan Greenspan

[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.

Chris Cleave

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

Chris Christie

I don't compromise my principles for politics.

David Tudor

Most electronic equipment uses the principle of amplification. You need filters, modulators and mixing equipment which have gain stages. By piling these components up, I was able to work without any sound generators and I made several pieces in that manner.

Athenaeus

Every investigation which is guided by principles of Nature fixes its ultimate aim entirely on gratifying the stomach.

Bertrand Russell

Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.

William Jennings Bryan

Principles are eternal...

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Faith is such a principle of power. God works by power, but this power is usually exercised in response to our faith.

Avicenna

Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.

Charles Dickens

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature .

Alan Watts

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

David Hume

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

Bill Maher

Eell there always is a tendency in human nature to deify.

Jami Gertz

That's human nature - the ups and downs.

Jane Smiley

There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.

Jane Smiley

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

Baltasar Gracian

What the multitude says, is so, or soon will be so.

Ludwig von Mises

German Marxian's coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed.