Ambrose Bierce Quotes

696 Sourced Quotes

RECONCILIATION, n. A suspension of hostilities. An armed truce for the purpose of digging up the dead.

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LIMB, n. The branch of a tree or the leg of an American woman.

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ZENITH, n. The point in the heavens directly overhead to a man standing or a growing cabbage. A man in bed or a cabbage in the pot is not considered as having a zenith, though Horizontalists hold that the posture of the body was immaterial.

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WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to.

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GEOGRAPHER, n. A chap who can tell you offhand the difference between the outside of the world and the inside.

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UXORIOUSNESS, n. A perverted affection that has strayed to one's own wife.

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WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster; an unexpected affliction that strikes hard.

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LAOCOON, n. A famous piece of antique scripture representing a priest of that name and his two sons in the folds of two enormous serpents. The skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the serpents and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as one of the noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human intelligence over brute inertia.

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APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. "The Mad Philosopher," 1697

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SARCOPHAGUS, n. Among the Greeks a coffin which being made of a certain kind of carnivorous stone, had the peculiar property of devouring the body placed in it.

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PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

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OATH, n. In law, a solemn appeal to the Deity, made binding upon the conscience by a penalty for perjury.

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REPARATION, n. Satisfaction that is made for a wrong and deducted from the satisfaction felt in committing it.

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PALACE, n. A fine and costly residence, particularly that of a great official. The residence of a high dignitary of the Christian Church is called a palace; that of the Founder of his religion was known as a field, or wayside. There is progress.

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EUCHARIST, n. A sacred feast of the religious sect of Theophagi. A dispute once unhappily arose among the members of this sect as to what it was that they ate. In this controversy some five hundred thousand have already been slain, and the question is still unsettled.

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A less popular name for the Second Person of that delectable newspaper Trinity, the Roomer, the Bedder, and the Mealer.

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EXHORT, v.t. In religious affairs, to put the conscience of another upon the spit and roast it to a nut-brown discomfort.

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Loquacity, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk.

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Gout, a physician's name for the rheumatism of a rich patient

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REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.

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MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.

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RECOUNT, n. In American politics, another throw of the dice, accorded to the player against whom they are loaded.

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LOGOMACHY, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem - a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

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TABLE D'HOTE, n. A caterer's thrifty concession to the universal passion for irresponsibility.

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QUORUM, n. A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have their own way and their own way of having it. In the U.S. Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House.

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Pantheism, n.
The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.

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Legitimate authority to be, to do or to have; as the right to be a king, the right to do one's neighbor, the right to have measles, and the like.

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ABDOMEN, n. The temple of the god Stomach, inwhose worship, with sacrificial rights, all true men engage.

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DISCUSSION, n. A method of confirming others in their errors.

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PROPHECY, n. The art and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery.

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