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RACK, n. An argumentative implement formerly much used in persuading devotees of a false faith to embrace the living truth. As a call to the unconverted the rack never had any particular efficacy, and is now held in light popular esteem.

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
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Argumentative
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Light
Popular
Rack
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Call
Implement
Unconverted

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Evolutionary biology is genuinely scientific, but more than that it opens the door to a world more marvellous than any Christian fundamentalist has ever read into the pages of the Bible.
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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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A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
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Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
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SACERDOTALIST, n. One who holds the belief that a clergyman is a priest. Denial of this momentous doctrine is the hardest challenge that is now flung into the teeth of the Episcopalian church by the Neo-Dictionarians.
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Distress: A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.
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CLOSE-FISTED, adj. Unduly desirous of keeping that which many meritorious persons wish to obtain.
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Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.
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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.
Ambrose Bierce
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Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.
Ambrose Bierce
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REPARATION, n. Satisfaction that is made for a wrong and deducted from the satisfaction felt in committing it.
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SATIETY, n. The feeling that one has for the plate after he has eaten its contents, madam.
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A revolution is a violent change of mismanagement.
Ambrose Bierce
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EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.
Ambrose Bierce
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TABLE D'HOTE, n. A caterer's thrifty concession to the universal passion for irresponsibility.
Ambrose Bierce
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A man who piously shuts himself up to meditate upon the sin of wickedness and to keep it fresh in his mind joins a brotherhood of awful examples.
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Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.
Ambrose Bierce
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It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of others from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.
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Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the government from running amuck by hamstringing it.
Ambrose Bierce