Ambrose Bierce Quotes

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains--chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment--in a word, Circumstance--and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

We live not according to reason, but according to fashion.

We smile at the women who are eagerly following the fashions in dress whilst we are as eagerly following the fashions in thought.

New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let em be unmanly), yet are followed.

Human behavior is subject to the same laws as any other natural phenomenon. Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture. No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns. If the environment is unaltered, similar behavior will reoccur.

I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.

Unquestioning obedience is for slaves, the uneducated and the pathetic.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

In my family, Fashion was something we never talked about, it was thought of as kind of superficial.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.-The Count of Monte Cristo

Friends make pretence of following to the grave but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand.

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

Pity on the person who has become accustomed to seeing in necessity something arbitrary, who ascribes to the arbitrary some sort of reason, and even claims that following that sort of reason has religious value.

You must be in fashion is the utterance of weak headed mortals.

He who would be singular in his apparel had need have something superlative to balance that affectation.

Fashion is custom in the guise of departure from custom

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

Laughter tends to mock the pompous and the pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his pretty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dullest hue of lead.