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LINEN, n. A kind of cloth the making of which, when made of hemp, entails a great waste of hemp.

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
Great
Made
Linen
Kind
Hemp
Entails
Cloth
Kindness
Waste
Making

More quotes by Ambrose Bierce

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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.
Ambrose Bierce
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Mad adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves at odds with the majority in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.
Ambrose Bierce
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REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
Ambrose Bierce
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Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Ambrose Bierce
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A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.
Ambrose Bierce
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RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans.
Ambrose Bierce
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LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used ... as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great quantities.
Ambrose Bierce
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MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce
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Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Ambrose Bierce
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TARIFF, n. A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.
Ambrose Bierce
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Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.
Ambrose Bierce
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MONOSYLLABIC, adj. Composed of words of one syllable . . . Commonly Saxon - that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the most elementary sentiments and emotions.
Ambrose Bierce
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What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
Ambrose Bierce
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Hurry n: The dispatch of bunglers.
Ambrose Bierce
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Book - Learning : The dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impertinent ignorance.
Ambrose Bierce
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INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
Ambrose Bierce
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Occident: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call war and commerce. These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient.
Ambrose Bierce
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Doubt is the father of invention.
Ambrose Bierce
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DEINOTHERIUM, n. An extinct pachyderm that flourished when the Pterodactyl was in fashion. The latter was a native of Ireland, its name being pronounced Terry Dactyl or Peter O'Dactyl, as the man pronouncing it may chance to have heard it spoken or seen it printed.
Ambrose Bierce
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A bad workman quarrels with the man who calls him that.
Ambrose Bierce