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MINISTER, n. An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility. In diplomacy, an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible embodiment of his sovereign's hostility.

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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Diplomacy
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Genius - to know without having learned to draw just conclusions from unknown premises to discern the soul of things.
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ZEUS /n./ The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog.
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THEOSOPHY, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science.
Ambrose Bierce
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Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.
Ambrose Bierce
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Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
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Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions where it can get a foothold it makes a stand where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall.
Ambrose Bierce
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True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked Unknown, and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in honoring the memory of him of whom no memory remains to honor but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.
Ambrose Bierce
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Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Bierce
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The best kind of onion soup is the simplest kind.
Ambrose Bierce
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Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Ambrose Bierce
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Work: a dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.
Ambrose Bierce
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REPRESENTATIVE, n. In national politics, a member of the Lower House in this world, and without discernible hope of promotion in the next.
Ambrose Bierce
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PRE-ADAMITE, n. One of an experimental and apparently unsatisfactory race of antedated Creation. . . . Little its known of them beyond the fact that they supplied Cain with a wife and theologians with a controversy.
Ambrose Bierce
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Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
Ambrose Bierce
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ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.
Ambrose Bierce
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Youth looks forward, for nothing is behind! Age backward, for nothing is before.
Ambrose Bierce
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Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Ambrose Bierce
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Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
Ambrose Bierce
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ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. This view of the attorney's position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a fee for assenting.
Ambrose Bierce
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Gout, a physician's name for the rheumatism of a rich patient
Ambrose Bierce