Ambrose Bierce Quotes
47 Quotes Found
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Ambrose Bierce
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Ambrose Bierce
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Ambrose Bierce
Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
Ambrose Bierce
Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
Ambrose Bierce
Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Ambrose Bierce
Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
Ambrose Bierce
Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
Ambrose Bierce
The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.
Ambrose Bierce
Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce
Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
Ambrose Bierce
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.
Ambrose Bierce
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce
Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Ambrose Bierce
Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Ambrose Bierce
Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
Ambrose Bierce
Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.
Ambrose Bierce
Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce
Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
Ambrose Bierce
Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
Ambrose Bierce