"It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars 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."

“Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.”

“Amiable weaknesses of human nature.”

“In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Hussyn will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.”

“Benevolence is the foundation of Justice, since we are forbidden to injure those we are bound to assist. A prophet may reveal the secrets of Heaven and futurity, but in his moral precepts he can only repeat the lessons of our own hearts.”

“A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches, had migrated from the banks of the Tiber, was incapable of restoring or adorning the city; and, as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.”

“Clodius Albinus surpassed both his competitors in the nobility of his extraction. Which he derived from the most illustrious names of the old Republic, but the branch from which he claimed descent had long sunk into mean circumstances, and transplanted into a remote province. It is difficult to form a just idea of his character. Under the philisophic cloak of austerity, he stands accused of concealing most of the vices which degrade human nature.”