Quotes By Ambrose Bierce

Creditor. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.

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

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

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.

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

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

Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

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

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

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

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

Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.

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

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

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

Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.

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

Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

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

Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

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

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

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

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

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

Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.