Ambrose Bierce

It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

Alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized.

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.