Ambrose Bierce
- Heathen is a benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
- Ignoramus: a person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.
- Hope is desire and expectation rolled into one.
- Bore: a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
- A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, is distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
- Piracy is a commerce without its folly - swaddles - just as God made it.
- Commendation: the tribute that we pay to achievements that resemble, but do not equal, our own.
- Pray: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
- Appeal in law: to put the dice into the box for another throw.
- Apologize: to lay the foundation for a future offence.
- Admiration: Our polite recognition of another man's resemblance to ourselves.
- Women and foxes, being weak, are distinguished by superior tact.
- Christian: one who believes that the new Testament is a divinely inspired book, admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbour.
- Perseverance: A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves a glorious success.
- Education: that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
- Epitaph: an inscription on a tomb showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
- An egotist is a person of low taste - more interested in himself than in me.
- Acquaintance isn't a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
- Painting: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
- Abstainer: a weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
- Destiny: a tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
- All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
- Mausoleum: the final and funniest folly of the rich.
- One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
- Achievement: The death of an endeavor, and the birth of disgust.
- Infidel: in New York - one who does not believe in the christian religion; in Constantinople - one who does.
- Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
- Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making, in all, two.
- Peace: in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
- To be positive: to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
- Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone.
- Cynicism is that blackguard defect of vision which compels us to see the world as it is, instead of as it should be.
- History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers,mostly fools.
- Philanthropist: a rich ( and usually bald ) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.
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