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"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."
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"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."

"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."

"The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy."

"Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new."

"Every past is worth condemning."

"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."

"Upon examination of a people's history, beware the story teller's motives."
Explore more quotes by Edward Gibbon

"I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes."

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."

"The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise."

"My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language."

"The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event."

"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."
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