Quotes from Ambrose Bierce

A bad workman quarrels with the man who calls him that.

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

BORE, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for securing individual profit without individual responsibility.

CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth — two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion.

CUSTARD, n. A detestable substance produced by a malevolent conspiracy of the hen, the cow, and the cook.

RECONSIDER, v. To seek a justification for a decision already made.

Happiness is lost by criticising it; sorrow by accepting it.

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

POKER, n. A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown.

HOSPITALITY, n. The virtue which induces us to lodge and feed certain persons who are not in want of food and lodging.

Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.

ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forebearance among men.

The circus a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to light lovers - particularly to those who love not wisely but other men's wives.

Backbite: To ''speak of a man as you find him'' when he can't find you.

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

MOUTH, n. In man, the gateway to the soul; in woman, the outlet of the heart.

An auctioneer is a man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.