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Absence
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Woman absent is woman dead.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Abstinence
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Abstainer. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Absurdity
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Absurdity. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Advice
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Consult. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Age
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Age. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Ambition
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Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Ancestry, Ancestors
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Genealogy. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Anger
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Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Architecture
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Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Atheism
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Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Irreligion. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Authors & Writing
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Let me tell you what a writer is. A writer takes comprehensive views, holds large convictions, makes wide generalizations. A writer's not English, Mexican, or American. A writer's not a woman nor a man. A writer's not Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, nor snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong a writer's civilly indifferent. In the virtues, a writer's concerned only with general expediency. A writer doesn't waste time focusing on fixed moral principles that aren't yet before the court of conscience. Happiness discloses itself to a writer as the end and purpose of life, and art and love are the only means to a writer's happiness. A writer is free of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, and politics. To a writer, a continent doesn't seem long, nor a century wide. And a writer has ever present consciousness that this is a world of...fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions, and frothing mad.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Beauty
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Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Boredom
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Bore -- a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Business
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Corporation. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Don't steal; thou it never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Censorship
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Censor, n. An officer of certain governments, employed to supress the works of genius. Among the Romans the censor was an inspector of public morals, but the public morals of modern nations will not bear inspection.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, 1967
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Certainty
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To be positive: to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Charity
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Philanthropist. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.
-Ambrose Bierce
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City Life, Cities
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When in Rome, do as Rome does.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Community
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Alliance. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Compromise
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Compromise. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Congress
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The Senate is a body of old men charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Conservatism
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Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Cowardice/Weakness
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A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Books by and about Ambrose Bierce