Ambrose Bierce

“Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.”

“Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.”

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

“Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.”

“Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.”

“Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.”

“Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.”

“Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.”

“An egotist is a person of low taste - more interested in himself than in me.”

“Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.”

“Compromise, n. 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.”

“Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!”

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

“Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.”

“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.”

“Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.”

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

“Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.”

“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 species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.”

“Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.”