[The Goths'] poverty was incurable; since the most liberal donatives were soon dissipated in wasteful luxury, and the most fertile estates became barren in their hands.

In the most rigorous [Roman] laws, a wife was condemned to support a gamester, a drunkard, or a libertine, unless he were guilty of homicide, poison, or sacrilege, in which cases the marriage, as it should seem, might have been dissolved by the hand of the executioner.

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

[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.

A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.

The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics [monks], incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity; and the Imperial troops acknowledged, without shame, that they were much less apprehensive of an encounter with the fiercest Barbarians.

The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.