Marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two
Source: The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Author
American · 1842-1914 · 30 quotes
American · 1842–1914
30 quotes in our collection
Ambrose Bierce was the American journalist and satirist whose Devil's Dictionary — a collection of sardonic redefinitions published serially between 1881 and 1906 — remains the sharpest single-volume assault on human self-deception in the English language. Born in Ohio in 1842, he served in the Union Army at Shiloh and Chickamauga and carried the war's capacity for destruction into his prose. His short stories, many set during the Civil War, have the cold precision of someone who has seen men die and found the universe indifferent. He disappeared in Mexico in 1913 or 1914, aged seventy-one, having gone to observe the revolution — an exit so characteristic it might have been planned. His definition of friendship — a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, only one in foul — is the summary of a man who trusted very few people and was proved right.
Collected Quotes
Marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two
Immigrant: An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Peace: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting
Vote: The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country
Lawyer: One skilled in circumvention of the law
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Opposition: In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.
Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be
Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
Day: A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent
Jealous: Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping
Hand: A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody's pocket
Year: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments
Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while
Wedding: A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.
Friendship: A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul
Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me
A grave is a place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student