Ambrose Bierce Quotes, Science Quotes, Machines Quotes

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

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Salamander: Originally a reptile inhabiting fire; later, an anthropomorphous immortal, but still a pyrophile. Salamanders are now believed to be extinct, the last one of which we have an account having been seen in Carcassonne by the Abbe Belloc, who exorcised it with a bucket of holy water.

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Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.

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Respectability, n. The offspring of a liaison between a bald head and a bank account.

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FORMA PAUPERIS. [Latin] In the character of a poor person - a method by which a litigant without money for lawyers is considerately permitted to lose his case.

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A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

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EXILE, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an ambassador.

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IMMORAL, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral.

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An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when the air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization.

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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.

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Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

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GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.

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CENTAUR, n. One of a race of persons who lived before the division of labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse."

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MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

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MISERICORDE, n. A dagger which in mediaeval warfare was used by the foot soldier to remind an unhorsed knight that he was mortal.

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MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.

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ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden.

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Homicide, /n./ The slaying of one human by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he died by one kind or another - the classification is for the advantage of the lawyers.

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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.

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DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.

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