Famous Quotes

Quotes by Ambrose Bierce

• Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
• Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
• Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.
• Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
• Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
• Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
• Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
• Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
• Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.
• Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
• Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
• Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
• Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
• Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
• Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
• Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
• Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
• Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
• Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
• Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.
• Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
• Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
• Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
• Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
• Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
• Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
• Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
• The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
• The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
• The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
• The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.
• To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
• To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
• Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
• War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
• We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.
• What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
• Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.
• Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
• Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.