Famous Ambrose Bierce Quotes

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

Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

Politeness: The most acceptable hypocrisy.

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

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.

Disobedience:The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.

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

Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Jealous: Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.

Immigrant: An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.

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

Commerce, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.

Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

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