Ambrose Bierce Quotes

The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.

Success, n. The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.

In the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent

For there be divers sorts of death — some wherein the body remained; and in some it vanished quite away with the spirit.

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

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.

Cannon, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

ARREST, v.t. Formally to detain one accused of unusualness. [Example:] God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

ARMY, n. A class of non-producers who defend the nation by devouring everything likely to tempt an enemy to invade.

"In a physician's office in Kearny Street three men sat about a table, drinking punch and smoking. It was late in the evening, almost midnight, indeed, and there had been no lack of punch. The gravest of the three, Dr. Helberson, was the host — it was in his rooms they sat. He was about thirty years of age; the others were even younger; all were physicians. "The superstitious awe with which the living regard the dead," said Dr. Helberson, "is hereditary and incurable. One needs no more be ashamed of it than of the fact that he inherits, for example, an incapacity for mathematics, or a tendency to lie." The others laughed. "Oughtn't a man to be ashamed to lie?" asked the youngest of the three, who was in fact a medical student not yet graduated. "My dear Harper, I said nothing about that. The tendency to lie is one thing; lying is another." "But do you think," said the third man, "that this superstitious feeling, this fear of the dead, reasonless as we know it to be, is universal? I am myself not conscious of it." "Oh, but it is 'in your system' for all that," replied Helberson; "it needs only the right conditions — what Shakespeare calls the 'confederate season' — to manifest itself in some very disagreeable way that will open your eyes. Physicians and soldiers are of course more nearly free from it than others." "Physicians and soldiers! — why don't you add hangmen and headsmen? Let us have in all the assassin classes." "No, my dear Mancher; the juries will not let the public executioners acquire sufficient familiarity with death to be altogether unmoved by it." Young Harper, who had been helping himself to a fresh cigar at the sideboard, resumed his seat. "What would you consider conditions under which any man of woman born would become insupportably conscious of his share of our common weakness in this regard?" he asked, rather verbosely. "Well, I should say that if a man were locked up all night with a corpse — alone — in a dark room — of a vacant house — with n

ARDOR, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

REPENTANCE, n. The faithful attendant and follower of Punishment. It is usually manifest in a degree of reformation that is not inconsistent with continuity of sin.

"An Italian proverb says: "The furrier gets the skins of more foxes than asses.

We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich.

Road, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.