Learning lessons from history

Even when I was a schoolboy, I loved history, both oral and written.

Now at 42, my love for reading good history books have grown even more passionate as I believe that there are indeed many lessons, both positive as well as negative, we can learn from good history books like British historian Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. As Bismarck was often quoted as saying: " fools say that they learn by experience, but I prefer to profit by others' experience" (B.H.Liddell Hart, Strategy, London, Meridian, 1991; p.3)

One of the great lessons of Edward Gibbon's history is that even a great polity like the Roman Empire could disintegrate from within by unproductive obssession with religious or theological speculations in public debates, moral and economic corruption of ruling elites, popular hedonism, and the usurpation of political power by the haughty military and insolent police, ambitiuous eunuchs and self-serving advisers as well as greedy relatives (including wives and sons) of emperors.