Quotes from Ambrose Bierce

Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the government from running amuck by hamstringing it.

You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.

REPRESENTATIVE, n. In national politics, a member of the Lower House in this world, and without discernible hope of promotion in the next.

PICKANINNY, n. The young of the "Procyanthropos", or "Americanus dominans". It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.

NOMINATE, v. To designate for the heaviest political assessment. To put forward a suitable person to incur the mudgobbling and deadcatting of the opposition.

ARENA, n. In politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.

Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.

ORPHAN, n. A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude . . .

MINISTER, n. An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility. In diplomacy, an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible embodiment of his sovereign's hostility.

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

ZEUS /n./ The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog.

When God makes a beautiful woman, the devil opens a new register.

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

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

MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

WINE, n.Fermented grape-juice known to the Women's Christian Union as "liquor," sometimes as "rum." Wine, madam, is God's next best gift to man.

The god of the world's leading religion.

Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.

WRATH, n. Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted characters and momentous occasions; as, "the wrath of God," "the day of wrath," etc. . . .

RITUALISM, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.

SCARABAEUS, n. The sacred beetle of the ancient Egyptians, allied to our familiar "tumble-bug." It was supposed to symbolize immortality, the fact that God knew why giving it its peculiar sanctity.

Democracy is defended in 3 stages. Ballot Box, Jury Box, Cartridge Box.

CALUMNUS, n. A graduate of the School for Scandal.