Edward Gibbon Quotes

I think Dutch people are very sober. I don't know if it's the right word. Like, you have the most famous person walk by some Dutch people, and they're like, 'Oh, hello.' And they maybe take a photo, but most of the time, they'll respect you and leave you alone. And if you go to some other countries they will literally mob you, go crazy.

Since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is no longer respectable. It was in the 1920s and '30s, but the Holocaust obviously changed that.

I was used to Essex boys growing up. Russian boys are a lot more gentlemanly and thoughtful. They will express their emotions a bit more.

The Germans call him 'Our Shakespeare' because we love him.

I grew up in the north of England, in New Castle, which is where Hadrian's Wall starts on the east coast of England and then goes across to the west.

In Japan, violence isn't as controversial as it is in the West.

When you're a kid, what you learn in school about being German has a sort of heaviness about it, and you have a sort of guilt with you.

American culture is so open compared to Korean culture, which is really conservative.

The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.

Drink is not a fashion in India, as it is in the West.

No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

Written in these walls are the stories that I can't explain

The Japanese tend to be far more co-operative and docile and group-oriented. It would be easier to get the entire population of Tokyo to wear matching outfits than to get any two randomly selected Americans to agree on pizza toppings.

First off, I think nudity is taken differently in America, though they did make a fuss in England, too.

To sacrifice the principles of manners, which require compassion and respect, and bat people over the head with their ignorance of etiquette rules they cannot be expected to know is both bad manners and poor etiquette. That social climbers and twits have misused etiquette throughout history should not be used as an argument for doing away with it.

We live in a society in the West, where, when men do violent things, they do them under orders. They are soldiers carrying out orders or mafia men carrying out killings for bosses. But the way things happen in the Middle East is not the same as in the West.

I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me.

An idea built the wall of separation between the sexes, and an idea will crumble it to dust.

A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.

If only those old walls could talk...how boring they would be.

The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.

I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.

The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!