Ambrose Bierce

“ Constituted as we are, we can know good only by contrast with evil. Our sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could not be kept alight. A community without crime would be a community without warm and elevated sentiments—without the sense of justice, without generosity, without courage, without mercy, without magnanimity—a community of small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. ”

“ In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places of the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud and populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman’s boast of national stability. ”

“ It will not do to say that an attorney in defending a client is not compelled to cheat and lie. What kind of defense could be made by any one who did not profess belief in the innocence of his client?—did not affirm it in the most serious and impressive way?—did not lie? How would it profit the defense to be conducted by one who would not meet the prosecution’s grave asseverations of belief in the prisoner’s guilt by equally grave assurances of faith in his innocence? And in point of fact, when was counsel for the defense ever known to forego the advantage of that solemn falsehood? ”

“ The “enlargement of woman’s opportunities” has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly traceable to “emancipation of woman” is as impregnable to the light as a toad in a rock.
A marked demerit of the new order of things—the régime of female commercial service—is that its main advantage accrues, not to the race, not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman, but to the person of least need and worth—the male employer. ”

“ This is one of the gravest accusations that the friends of progress and light have been called out to meet—a challenge that it is impossible to ignore and unprofitable to evade; for the dog as we have the happiness to know him is the only dog that we have the happiness really to know. The wolf is hardly a dog within the meaning of the law, nor is the scalp-yielding coyote, whether he howls or merely sings and plays the piano; moreover, these are beyond the pale of civilization and outside the scope of our sympathies. ”

“ If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is not mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street peddler—to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf from the door without eating him—to abandon their ignoble callings, seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them right sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. ”

“ Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils besetting monarchies, excepting those for which we secretly yearn; that inequality of fortune and unjust allotment of honors are as conspicuous among us as elsewhere; that the tyranny of individuals is as intolerable and that of the public more so; that the law’s majesty is a dream and its failure a fact—hearing everywhere the footfalls of disorder and the watchwords of anarchy, I despair of the republic, and catch in every breeze that blows “a cry prophetic of its fall.” ”

“ That I should give my hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in mere homage to, or recognition of, his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations of a proper respect for “the President’s great office” is either a rogue, a dupe or a journalist. ”

“ Where then were the fiery altruists and storm-petrels of industrial disorder? The ingenious gods who have invented the Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that would make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold selfish hearts to order out their followers to redress a public wrong, but only to inflict one—to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetite for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, or punish the crime of prosperity. ”

“ We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization. We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich. It is not permitted to our employers to plead in justification of low wages the law of supply and demand when it is giving them high profits. It is not permitted to discontented employees to break the bones of contented ones and destroy the foundations of social order. ”

“ The sovereign power—the tribunal of ultimate jurisdiction—is a mob. If the mob is large enough (it need not be very large) , even if composed of vicious tramps, it may do as it will. It may destroy property and life. It may without proof of guilt inflict upon individuals torments unthinkable by fire and flaying, mutilations that are nameless. It may call men, women and children from their beds and beat them to death with cudgels. In the light of day it may assail the very strongholds of law in the heart of a populous city, and assassinate prisoners of whose guilt it knows nothing. ”

“ Do you think that when all women are armed with the ballot they will compel a return to the old régime of reverence and delicate consideration—extorting by their power the tribute once voluntarily paid to their weakness? Is there any known way by which women can at the same time be our political equals and our social superiors, our competitors in the sharp and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread, and the objects of our unselfish and undiminished devotion? ”

“ With the dog it is different. His place is among us; he is with us and of us—a part of our life and love. If we are maintaining and promoting a condition of things that fatigues him it is befitting that we mend our ways lest, shaking the carpet dust from his feet and the tenderloin steaks from his teeth, he depart from our midst and connect himself with the enchanted life of the thrilling barbarian. ”

“ You know that in a republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than it cures—that it cures none. You know that even the “money power” is powerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know that nobody can bribe nor intimidate a legislator or voter who will not take a bribe nor suffer himself to be intimidated—that there can be no “money power” in a nation of honorable and courageous men. ”

“ Through centuries of time and with an appalling sacrifice of life the effort has gone on, a continuous war characterized by monstrous infractions of law and morals, by incalculable cruelty and crime. Our own generation has witnessed the culminating triumphs of this revolution, and now, while still the clank of the falling chains is echoing through the world, and still a diminishing multitude of the world’s workers is in bondage under the old system, the others, for whose liberation was all this “expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” are sharply challenging the advantage of the new. ”

“ The death penalty, say these amiables and futilitarians, creates blood-thirstiness in the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends—is itself a cause of murder, not a check. These gentlemen are themselves of “the unthinking masses”—they do not know how to think. Let them try to trace and lucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the knowledge that a murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a murder. ”

“ Into the vortex of politics goes every floating thing that is free to move. The summons to the polls will be imperative and incessant. Duty will thunder it from every platform, conscience whisper it into every ear; pride, interest, the lust of victory—all the motives that impel men to partisan activity will act with the same power upon women as upon men; and to all the other forces flowing irresistibly toward the polls will be added the suasion of men themselves. ”

“ On the remaining one-eighth we pass a comfortless and precarious existence in disputed occupancy with countless ministers of death and pain—pass it in fighting for it, tooth and nail, a hopeless battle in which we are foredoomed to defeat. Everywhere death, terror, lamentation and the laughter that is more terrible than tears—the fury and despair of a race hanging on to life by the tips of its fingers! ”

“ Life in civilized countries is so complex that men there have more ways to be good than savages have, and more to be bad; more to be happy, and more to be miserable. And in each way to be good or bad, their generally superior knowledge—their knowledge of more things—enables them to commit greater excesses than the savage can. The civilized philanthropist wreaks upon his fellows a ranker philanthropy, the civilized rascal a sturdier rascality. And—splendid triumph of enlightenment!—the two characters are, in civilization, frequently combined in one person. ”

“ For eloquence per se—considered merely as an art of pleasing—I entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always pleases at least the speaker. It is to speech what an ornate style is to writing—good and pleasant enough in its time and place and, like pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common sense. Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient foundation in reason and the order of things: it promotes the ambition of tricksters and advances the fortunes of rogues. ”

“ I have heard men of decent life and social repute gravely defend the thesis that the public has a right to all that an author has written; and as his letters are likely to be rather more interesting than those of one who works at another trade, they are held to have a value disproportionate to the mere fame of their writer. We all concede the virtue of abstention from theft of a paste jewel, but a real diamond!—that is another matter.
The people are not pigs; the author of their favorite personal letters need not have a great personal renown. ”

“ Principle is not always an infallible guide. For illustration, it is not always expedient—that is, for the good of all concerned—to tell the truth, to be entirely just or merciful, to pay a debt. I can conceive a case in which it would be right to assassinate one’s neighbor. Suppose him to be a desperate scoundrel of a chemist who has devised a means of setting the atmosphere afire. The man who should go through life on an inflexible line of principle would border his path with a havoc of human happiness. ”

“ And I did not—thank Heaven!—observe the mob of American “simple republicans” that dogged the heels of a disreputable little Frenchman who is a count by courtesy only, and those of an English duke quietly attending to his own business of making a living by being a married man. The republican New World is no less impested with servility than the monarchical Old. One form of government may be better than another for this purpose, or for that; all are alike in the futility of their influence upon human character. None can affect man’s instinctive abasement in the contemplation of power and rank. ”

“ One thing that civilization certainly has not done is to make us intelligent enough to understand that the contrary of a virtue is not necessarily a vice. Because, as a rule, we have but one wife and several mistresses each it is not certain that polygamy is everywhere—nor, for that matter, anywhere—either wrong or inexpedient. Because the brutality of the civilized slave owners and dealers created a conquering sentiment against slavery it is not intelligent to assume that slavery is a maleficent thing amongst Oriental peoples (for example) where the slave is not oppressed. ”

“ By the way, dear reader, did you ever happen to consider the possibility that you are a lunatic, and perhaps confined in an asylum? It seems to you that you are not—that you go with freedom where you will, and use a sweet reasonableness in all your works and ways; but to many a lunatic it seems that he is Rameses II, or the Holkar of Indore. Many a plunging maniac, ironed to the floor of a cell, believes himself the Goddess of Liberty careering gaily through the Ten Commandments in a chariot of gold. Of your own sanity and identity you have no evidence that is any better than he has of his. ”

“ Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical means to a simple end—the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours is bearing crab-apples. If the body politic is constitutionally diseased, as I verily believe; if the disorder inheres in the system; there is no remedy. The fever must burn itself out, and then Nature will do the rest. One does not prescribe what time alone can administer. We have put our criminals and dunces into power; do we suppose they will efface themselves? ”