Ambrose Bierce Quotes

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

The richest persons in Africa are heads of state, governors and ministers. So every 'educated' African who wants to be rich - and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich - heads straight into government or politics.

My agent tells me I am drawing the largest salary ever paid in the halls of England. Wonderful, isn't it? for a quiet, rural gardener like myself.

Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.

They say Yogi Berra is funny. Well, he has a lovely wife and family, a beautiful home, money in the bank, and he plays golf with millionaires. What's funny about that?

The House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence and then prays for the country.

What's a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.

I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.

anybody can be a princess. all you have todo is have the right parents. it's no harder than being born Paris Hilton, for God's sake. at least you remember to put on underwear in the morning, i'm assuming

A Halloween-haired, Sachsgate-enacting, estuary-whining, glitter-lacquered, priapic berk How dare I, from my velvet chaise longue, in my Hollywood home like Kubla Khan, drag my limbs from my harem to moan about the system? A system that has posited me on a lilo made of thighs in an ocean filled with honey and foie gras'd my Essex arse with undue praise and money.

Here's what I suggest," he said. "You pretend that rats can think, and I'll promise to pretend that humans can think, too.

In the same way the eminence attaching to the mere possession of great wealth disappoints us nine times out of ten, especially if the wealth has been accumulated rapidly. For great wealth is accumulated rapidly by cunning or chance, or a mixture of the two. Cunning has nothing to do with high qualities; it is rather a presumption against them; while chance has nothing to do with them either. Therefore it is that men are always complaining after meeting So-and-so, that he seemed to be astonishingly stupid, though he made a million in ten years and started as a pauper.

When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, "the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery'," and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of "the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.

I think Americans love success - but hate the people who have it.

[P]ride is something only folk with money can afford.

Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man's attitude when he has power.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

When you grow up in Bel Air and shop only in expensive boutiques on Rodeo and Robertson, you develop a kind of allergy to anything unpretty -clothes, cars... even people... you start thinking that if you hang around unattractive people, their homeliness can be contagious.

Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

I think a snob would be a person who thinks he is entitled; he has good things in his life and is entitled to them.

People think I'm as shallow and superficial as I look, and it's a surprise when they find out, sure enough, I am.

He that cannot reason is a fool.

It is the pure arrogance of the newly rich and the newly powerful to think content is easy.