Ambrose Bierce Quotes

Apologize: To lay the foundation for a future offence.

DOG: A kind of additional or subsidiary Diety designed to catch the overflow or surplus of the world's worship.

Prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Achievement is the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.

Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

The echo of a platitude.

Bore: a person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Piracy n: commerce without its folly-swaddles - just as God made it.

Abstainer: a weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

Christian: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbour.

A statesman who is enamored of existing evils as distin-quished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.

Cynicism is that blackguard defect of vision which compels us to see the world as it is instead of as it should be.

Mausoleum n: the final and funniest folly of the rich.

Epitaph n: an inscription on a tomb showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

Education n: that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

That sovereign of insufferables.

Destiny n: a tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.

Platonic Love is a fool's name for the affection between a disability and a frost.

History n: an account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools.

Acquaintance n: a person whom we know well enough to borrow from but not well enough to lend to.

Ignoramus: a person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.

Appeal in law: to put the dice into the box for another throw.

Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone.

Marriage n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master a mistress and two slaves making in all two.

Philanthropist: a rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

To be positive: to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Painting n: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Peace: in international affairs a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

Responsibility n: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God Fate Fortune Luck or one's neighbour. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

Commendation n: the tribute that we pay to achievements that resemble but do not equal our own.

Pray v: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Heathen n. A beknighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.

Infidel n: in New York one who does not believe in the Christian religion in Constantinople one who does.

Apologize v: to lay the foundation for a future offence.

Perseverance n.: A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves a glorious success.

Achievement: The death of an endeavor and the birth of disgust.

Women and foxes being weak are distinguished by superior tact.

Admiration: Our polite recognition of another man's resemblance to ourselves.

Spring beckons! All things to the call respond the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.

The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.

Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.