Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second more personal and important, from him… - Edward Gibbon

Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

[I]n this rage against slavery, in the numerous petitions against the Slave trade was there no leaven of new democratical principles, no wild ideas of the rights and natural equality of man? It is these I fear.

[A historian] will more seriously deplore the loss of the Byzantine libraries, which were destroyed or scattered in the general confusion: one hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared; ten volumes might be purchased for a single ducat; and the same ignominious price, too high perhaps for a shelf of theology, included the whole works of Aristotle and Homer, the noblest productions of the sciences and literature of ancient Greece.