Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Gibbon

Gibbon’s line has the chill of an accountant’s ledger applied to human feeling: revenge yields a measurable return, gratitude racks up costs. Coming from an Enlightenment historian with a long view of empires and their petty feuds, it reads less like a personal maxim than a diagnosis of how power actually moves. Revenge is “profitable” because it’s legible. It signals dominance, deters rivals, consolidates loyalty through fear, and offers the intoxicating clarity of a score settled. In courts and cabinets - the worlds Gibbon studied - retaliation is a currency everyone recognizes, and it can be cashed quickly in reputation and obedience.

Gratitude, by contrast, is “expensive” because it obligates. To express thanks is to admit dependence, to acknowledge another person’s agency in your survival or success. That confession can be politically destabilizing: it flattens hierarchies, complicates narratives of self-made virtue, and demands repayment that may not be strategically convenient. Gratitude also has carrying costs. It requires attention, memory, and humility - qualities that don’t scale well in bureaucracies or conquest states, where forgetting is often a feature, not a bug.

The subtext is a bleak anthropology: societies tend to reward the emotions that sharpen control and punish the ones that create mutual claims. Gibbon isn’t merely cynical; he’s warning that when incentives favor vendetta over acknowledgment, civilizations drift toward cruelty dressed up as pragmatism.