Ambrose Bierce

MAJESTY, n. The state and title of a king. Regarded with a just contempt by the Most Eminent Grand Masters, Grand Chancellors, Great Incohonees and Imperial Potentates of the ancient and honorable orders of republican America.

INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.

MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

CONGRESS, n. A body of men who meet to repeal laws.

THEOSOPHY, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science.

Truth - An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.

PRICE, n. Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear and tear of conscience in demanding it.

OATH, n. In law, a solemn appeal to the Deity, made binding upon the conscience by a penalty for perjury.

INJUSTICE, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others and carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the back.

RETRIBUTION, n. A rain of fire-and-brimstone that falls alike upon the just and such of the unjust as have not procured shelter by evicting them.

INDIFFERENT, adj. Imperfectly sensible to distinctions among things.

REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

MERCY, n. An attribute beloved of detected offenders.

SPOOKER, n. A writer whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks.

PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.

OBLIVION, n. The state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame's eternal dumping ground.

A rabbit's foot may bring good luck to you, but it brought none to the rabbit.

CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance - against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance.

HYENA, n. A beast held in reverence by some oriental nations from its habit of frequenting at night the burial-places of the dead. But the medical student does that

Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.