Edward Gibbon's Facebook Page

As time goes by The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire holds up disproportionately fewer and fewer bookshelves.

Those we hope to educate we first frighten, so that the most frightened become superior and take the lead.

But what happens when one rejects the culture, in the present case an overwhelming glut of non-consequence, that one's been offered? Now there's an interesting question!

People who think they're more interesting than others are often much less. No matter their standing, their power, their importance, there will always be a group they can't quite gain access to. More often than not that group is the one to which their secret heart aspires.

I fear becoming one of the people I ignore on Facebook whom I've befriended and who've befriended me but who I wouldn't know if they walked into my bathroom or through the garden in which I write, and who don't know me.