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.