Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.
Ambrose Bierce

Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
Ambrose Bierce

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Ambrose Bierce

Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
Ambrose Bierce

Creditor. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.
Ambrose Bierce

Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.
Ambrose Bierce

Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
Ambrose Bierce

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

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

Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Ambrose Bierce

Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Ambrose Bierce

Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
Ambrose Bierce

Divorce: a resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.
Ambrose Bierce

Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.
Ambrose Bierce

Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.
Ambrose Bierce

Doubt is the father of invention.
Ambrose Bierce

Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.
Ambrose Bierce

Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Ambrose Bierce

Edible - good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Ambrose Bierce