Quotes By Ambrose Bierce

Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.

Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.

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

Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.

Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.

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

Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.

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

Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world.

Doubt is the father of invention.

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.

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.

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

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.