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A leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle only to find that the creature has long been dead, deems it expedient to form a new attachment to a fresh turtle.

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
Long
Shells
Leech
Attachment
Deems
Creature
Leeches
Fresh
Penetrated
Creatures
Expedient
Dead
Turtle
Form
Turtles
Find
Shell

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Fidelity - a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
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Hurry n: The dispatch of bunglers.
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GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.
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A lottery is a tax on stupidity.
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SACRED, adj. Dedicated to some religious purpose having a divine character inspiring solemn thoughts or emotions as... the Cow in India the Crocodile, the Cat and the Onion of ancient Egypt.
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Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.
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Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
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God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
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Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
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It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.
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PREFERENCE, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another.
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One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less of hands across the sea, and a little more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night professions of eternal amity provide the nigh
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RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.
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PALACE, n. A fine and costly residence, particularly that of a great official. The residence of a high dignitary of the Christian Church is called a palace that of the Founder of his religion was known as a field, or wayside. There is progress.
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Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
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YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown.
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INFALAPSARIAN, n. One who ventures to believe that Adam need not have sinned unless he had a mind to - in opposition to the Supralapsarians, who hold that that luckless person's fall was decreed from the beginning.
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Habit: A shackle for the free.
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REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
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AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.
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