Quotes by Ambrose Bierce

“His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of ...”

“AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”

“POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

“GRAPESHOT, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.”

“Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'.”

“OBSOLETE, adj. No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if ...”

“You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.”

“Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.”

“BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.”

“Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.”

“History An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”

“God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.”

“Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.”

“This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson ...”

“Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and his own spe...”

“Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.”

“Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb...”

“Deep sadness is an artist of powers that affects people in different ways. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, shocking all the emotions to a sharper life. To another, it comes as the blow...”

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

“He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed sim...”