Ambrose Bierce's Quotes

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Egotism, n: Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.

Fidelity - a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.

To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.

Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

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

Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.

Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.

Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.

Life - a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.

Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

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

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

Amnesty, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

Doubt is the father of invention.

Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.

Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

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

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.

We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.

Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

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

Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.

Edible - good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

Compromise, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.

A man is known by the company he organizes.

A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

Abscond - to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.

Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.

Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers. What I said was that all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.

It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.

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

The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.

Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.

Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.

Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.

Alien - an American sovereign in his probationary state.

Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.