Ambrose Bierce

BIERCEISMS
A dictionary from the mind of Ambrose Bierce

Aborigines: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

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

Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

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

Beauty: The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

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

Brain: An apparatus with which we think we think.

Calamities: Misfortunes to ourselves or good fortune to others.

Conservative: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

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

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

Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.

Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

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

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

Learning: The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worthwhile.

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

Patience: A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

Politeness: The most acceptable hypocrisy.

Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Revolution: In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

War: God's way of teaching Americans geography.