In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.
Interpretation
People often prioritize their safety and stability over their personal freedoms and autonomy.
Edward Gibbon's quote suggests that in times of uncertainty, individuals may choose the comfort of security over the exhilarating, yet risky nature of freedom. This highlights a fundamental tension in human nature: the desire for safety can sometimes overshadow the pursuit of liberty, leading to a compromise on personal autonomy in favor of societal or personal protection.
In practice
In a speech about government policies regarding citizen surveillance.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted 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.
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
A man is never so truly and intensely himself as when he is most possessed by God. It is impossible to say where, in the spiritual life, the human will leaves off and divine grace begins.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.
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