Edward Gibbon Quotes

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots, as freedom is to slavery.

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists … poverty is slavery!

There's no future in being poor.

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery.

India has political freedom but it does not have economic freedom.

No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

The ability to take advantage of freedom and democracy is proportional to the size of your bank account.

… so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

... timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.

If you work, you should not be poor.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, ... that is tyranny.

In France … the Gentry who may possess Lands, live in good condition, though the Peasants are little better then Slaves, because they can possess nothing but at the will of others.

Excessive liberty leads both nations and individuals into excessive slavery.

To think that man, thou just and loving God! Should stand before thee with a tyrant's rod, O'er creatures like himself, with souls from Thee, Yet dare to boast of perfect liberty! Away! away! I'd rather hold my neck By doubtful tenure from a Sultan's beck, In climes where liberty has scarce been nam'd, Nor any right but that of ruling claim'd, Than thus to live where boasted Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves!