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Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.

Ambrose Bierce

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Ambrose Bierce
Born: 1842
Born: June 24
Aphorist
Journalist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Meigs County
Ohio
Dod Grile
William Herman
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
Ambrose Bierce
Ties
Chains
Debtors
Debt
Whip
Financial
Whips
Ingenious
Substitute
Chain
Substitutes

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Miss: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Misses (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense.
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RITUALISM, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.
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REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.
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Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
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HOMŒOPATHIST, n. The humorist of the medical profession.
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PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.
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RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans.
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To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.
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TEDIUM, n. Ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source --the first words of the ancient Latin hymn _Te Deum Laudamus_. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.
Ambrose Bierce
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Happiness has not to all the same name: to Youth she is known as the Future Age knows her as the Dream.
Ambrose Bierce
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aim, n. The task we set our wishes to.
Ambrose Bierce
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At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.
Ambrose Bierce
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Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.
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Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep.
Ambrose Bierce
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A person of greater enterprise than discretion, who in embracing an opportunity has formed an unfortunate attachment.
Ambrose Bierce
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ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.
Ambrose Bierce
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GUNPOWDER, n. An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted.
Ambrose Bierce
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PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
Ambrose Bierce
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Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.
Ambrose Bierce
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FEMALE, n. One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.
Ambrose Bierce