%% (fortunes) A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Absentee, n.: A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove himself from the sphere of exaction. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Abstainer, n.: A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Adore, v.: To venerate expectantly. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from Heaven. As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought, and turned to God and said, "A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon to be created." "This is true," He replied. "He will need laws," said the Demon slyly. "What! You, his appointed Enemy for all Time! You ask for the right to make his laws?" "Oh, no!" Satan replied, "I ask only that he be allowed to make his own." It was so granted. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Age, n.: That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we no longer have the enterprise to commit. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Alliance, n.: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Alone, adj.: In bad company. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Bore, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Brain, n.: The apparatus with which we think that we think. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Brain, v. [as in "to brain"]: To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of error in an opponent. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Bride, n.: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% ... But as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Cabbage, n.: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% 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. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am." -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Coronation, n.: The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Coward, n.: One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Critic, n.: A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Cynic, n.: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Dawn, n.: The time when men of reason go to bed. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Dentist, n.: A Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one's mouth, pulls coins out of one's pockets. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Did you know that clones never use mirrors? -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Distress, n.: A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Egotist, n.: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Garter, n.: An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of her stockings and desolating the country. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Hand, n.: A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly thrust into somebody's pocket. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Happiness, n.: An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Hatred, n.: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Hippogriff, n.: An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Honorable, adj.: Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur." -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Idiot, n.: A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Impartial, adj.: Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two conflicting opinions. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% 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, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Incumbent, n.: Person of liveliest interest to the outcumbents. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Infancy, n.: The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven lies about us." The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Ink, n.: A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Interpreter, n.: One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when it is thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Kleptomaniac, n.: A rich thief. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Labor, n.: One of the processes by which A acquires property for B. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Liar, n.: A lawyer with a roving commission. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Mad, adj.: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence ... -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet. The two definition immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Magpie, n.: A bird whose thievish disposition suggested to someone that it might be taught to talk. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds. Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Man, n.: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Misfortune, n.: The kind of fortune that never misses. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Miss, n.: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Molecule, n.: The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter ... The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion ... -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Monday, n.: In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Mythology, n.: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Noncombatant, n.: A dead Quaker. -- Ambrose Bierce %% November, n.: The eleventh twelfth of a weariness. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Once Law was sitting on the bench And Mercy knelt a-weeping. "Clear out!" he cried, "disordered wench! Nor come before me creeping. Upon your knees if you appear, 'Tis plain you have no standing here." Then Justice came. His Honor cried: "YOUR states? -- Devil seize you!" "Amica curiae," she replied -- "Friend of the court, so please you." "Begone!" he shouted -- "There's the door -- I never saw your face before!" -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Once, adv.: Enough. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Peace, n.: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Pig, n.: An animal (Porcus omnivorous) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it balks at pig. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Politician, n.: An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Reporter, n.: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Senate, n.: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors. -- 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 %% The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men. -- Ambrose Bierce %% There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy ... -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether -- whose existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation ... A fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about the matter than the others. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Truthful, adj.: Dumb and illiterate. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands you are safe, for you can watch both of his. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Wit, n.: The salt with which the American Humorist spoils his cookery ... by leaving it out. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Year, n.: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"