“For no one is so senseless as to choose of his own will war rather peace, since in peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons.”
— Herodotus, The Histories, Vol. I (trans. G. C. Macaulay)
“Thus then, O Croesus, man is altogether a creature of accident.”
— Herodotus, The Histories, Vol. I (trans. G. C. Macaulay)
“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”
— Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776)
“Inheritance and memory make human stability.”
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I: Reason in Common Sense (1905)
“giving an account of the cities of men, small as well as great: for those which in old times were great have for the most part become small, while those that were in my own time great used in former times to be small: so then, since I know that human prosperity never continues steadfast, I shall make mention of both indifferently.”
— Herodotus, The Histories, Vol. I (trans. G. C. Macaulay)
“No great man lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.”
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)
“The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed, that in proportion to her former greatness, the fall of Rome was the more awful and deplorable.”
— Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 6 (1789)
“In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (trans. Richard Crawley)
“Life is thus enriched and reaction adapted to a wider field; much as a note is enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, inherited from the preceding notes, which give it a new setting.”
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I: Reason in Common Sense (1905)
“Croesus, thou art inquiring about human fortunes of one who well knows that the Deity is altogether envious and apt to disturb our lot.”
— Herodotus, The Histories, Vol. I (trans. G. C. Macaulay)
“learn this first, that for the affairs of men there is a revolving wheel, and that this in its revolution suffers not the same persons always to have good fortune.”
— Herodotus, The Histories, Vol. I (trans. G. C. Macaulay)
“the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.”
— Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 3 (1781)
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truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
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