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Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

Ambrose Bierce

Optimism – the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Beautiful Belief Optimism Ugly
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Device Profit Responsibility
Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Appearance Earth Face Genius God Leaving Nature Original Root Woman
There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Adventure Knowledge Old Sun Wisdom
Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Happiness Temptation Weakness
Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Death Money Person Praise Wealth
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Act Repeat Word
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Care Civilization Government Intelligence Ourselves Reward
Electricity is the power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else
AMBROSE BIERCE

Electricity Natural Reason
There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Instrument Worst
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

Art Charm Measurement Nature Worm
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Fall Hard Himself Man
An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Advantage Election Good Stolen
Age, with his eyes in the back of his head, thinks it wisdom to see the bogs through which he has floundered.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Age Head Himself See Thinking Wisdom
Labor is one of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Labor Pregnant Property
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
AMBROSE BIERCE

Degree Independence Intellectual

Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

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Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

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Popular Authors

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