Quotes By Ambrose Bierce

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.

Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.

Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

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

Life - a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

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

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

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

Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

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

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

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

Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.

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.

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.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

To be positive is to be 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.

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

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

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

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

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

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.