Quotes by Ambrose Bierce
Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.
Divorce: a resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.
Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.
Consul - in American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
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.
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.
Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.
Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
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.
Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.
Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Impartial - unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
Amnesty, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.
Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.
Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized.
