Quotes By Ambrose Bierce

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.

Backbite. To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find you.

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Confidante: One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.

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

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

Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.

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

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

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

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

An egotist is a person of low taste - more interested in himself than in me.

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

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

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

A man is known by the company he organizes.

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

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.

When you doubt, abstain.

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

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

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

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

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.

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

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