The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.
Interpretation
The quote addresses hypocrisy in human behavior, where people criticize others for faults they themselves possess.
Edward Gibbon's quote highlights the hypocrisy prevalent in human nature, where individuals are quick to condemn others for flaws or shortcomings that they themselves exhibit but choose to overlook. This selective judgment often hinges on arbitrary distinctions such as age or social status, allowing the individual to maintain a moral high ground while still engaging in the same behaviors they decry in others. The quote serves as a reminder of the need for self-awareness and consistency in our moral judgments.
In practice
In a discussion about ethics, this quote can be referenced to illustrate the concept of hypocrisy among critics.
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.
The number of guests at dinner should not be less than the number of the Graces nor exceed that of the Muses, i.e., it should begin with three and stop at nine.
Pippin: I didn't think it would end this way._x000D_ Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path... One that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass... And then you see it._x000D_ Pippin: What? Gandalf?... See what?_x000D_ Gandalf: White shores... and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise._x000D_ Pippin: Well, that isn't so bad._x000D_ Gandalf: No... No it isn't.
We've learned how to destroy, but not to create; how to waste, but not to build; how to kill men, but not how to save them; how to die, but seldom how to live.
Politics are not the task of a Christian.
If you want to know everything about the market, go to the beach. Push and pull your hands with the waves. Some are bigger waves, some are smaller. But if you try to push the wave out when it's coming in, it'll never happen. The market is always right.
I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.
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