Elbert Hubbard

“ A state of divine revelation wherein for a single moment we are carried by the giant of Eternal Inutility to the abysms and summits of the perpetual Nix. (The word boredom comes from Bore, a tired son of Noah. After the subsidence of the waters, Bore wandered about the earth, yawning and gaping and stretching, for at that time malaria oozed from many stagnant pools. Finally, absolutely exhausted, Bore, being afraid to be down on the damp and slimy soil, rested on the seventh day on his own bean, hence boredom.) ”

“ Intelligence: The grand inquisitor that tortures from every truth the confession that it lies, and from every lie a confession of its divine necessity. [74]
Ideal Life: Man's normal life, as we shall some day know it. ”

“ Psychology: The science of human minds and their relationship one to another.
Public Opinion: The judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of the discerning few.
Punishment: 1. The justice that the guilty deal out to those who are caught. 2. A perpetual fine, imposed hourly during the lifetime of a human being for his temerity in living, and continued in Heaven or Hell for his temerity in dying. 3. Among the poor and lowly, a service due the State for disobeying the mandates of the rich and powerful; among the rich, a slight reaction from overeating. ”

“ A mask we wear to hide our ignorance. ”

“ An endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it. ”

“ A state of chumminess between persons of opposite sex and suitable ages is more or less in the line of Nature. But that can't-get-along-without-you feeling between persons of the same sex is a form of hate and means that some third party is going to be beaned. ”

“ The ability to act wisely without precedent—the power to do the right thing for the first time. ”

“ Anarchist: 1. A Christian dilettante; one who casts a shadow on tomorrow while waiting for the Greek Kalends. 2. A mouther of sublime inanities. 3. One who maps and surveys the air and constructs dainty Utopias with the building-blocks quarried from his unbelievable credulity. 4. In the insane asylum of idealists, a man who imagines himself to be God. 5. A militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and Reason because he can not stand competition.
American Plan: A scheme for shortening human life through overeating. ”

“ A hard substance which forms in a soft brain; a coprolitic idea; a lie imperiously reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe they believe what some one else believes. ”

“ A form of hell whereby money is transferred from the pockets of the proletariat to that of lawyers.
[91] ANKIND: 1. A nomadic savage that has wandered over the face of the earth from East to West in order to reach the East so it could go West again. It has left many traces of its life—barrooms, brothels, jails, churches, gallows, best sellers, etc. 2. In the animal kingdom, a surreptitious and supposititious supererogation. 3. Among the Simians a place equivalent to our hell. "Oh, you go to Mankind," is quite frequently heard in the African jungle, even in the best society. ”

“ A person with a servile mind, who quickly crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning; who gratifies his wants either through cringing flattery or coercion, and who tyrannizes over others whenever he has a chance. ”

“ Tomorrow, next week, next year, next century, pretty soon—any imaginary space of time after the present moment.
Existence: 1. A metaphysical term which originally meant joy, but which since the beginning of the Christian era has come to mean pain. 2. To be (used only in the phrase "to be damned") . 3. Merely to live, without eating or drinking. (In London, Paris and New York, this phenomenon is quite common.) [51]
Experience: 1. The germ of power. 2. The name every one gives his mistakes. 3. Stinging and getting stung. ”

“ Any smell that is used to down a worse one. ”

“ The bodily attitude of a speaker or a preacher in the presence of people whose duty it is to believe he is not lying to them. 4. A mask we wear to hide our ignorance. (Man has dignity, woman has poise, animals have power; hence, dignity in a man or woman is anything that is a substitute for power.) [39]
Disappointment: 1. The cradle of the ideal. 2. The skeleton of Purpose and the skull and crossbones of Desire. 3. A feeling in regard to the past that comes to every one on the Thirty-first of each December. 4. The final issue of any act begun yesterday, today or tomorrow. ”

“ Any place where men have builded a jail, a bagnio, a gallows, a morgue, a church, a hospital, a saloon, and laid out a cemetery—hence a center of life. 2. A herding region; any part of the earth where ignorance and stupidity integrate, agglomerate and breed. [27]
Civilization: A device for increasing human ills; a machine for the perpetuation of the weak; an ingenious contraption for spreading disease and hunger. (See war, harlot, politician, liar, Teddy, Sulzer, Murphy, hypocrisy, newspaper, forger, jail, policemen, lawyer, walking delegate, capitalist, poverty, clergyman.) ”

“ The Unseen Intelligence which loved us into being, and is disposing of us by the same token. ”

“ An individual who works only for the interest of the institution of which he is a part, not against it. ”

“ A natural, unaffected person; one who has no conscience, who is honest, upright, and always at war. 2. A Deist, a Pantheist, who sees God in everything and feels His presence everywhere, even in his cannibalistic rites; hence, the first thinker in any country. 3. One who hates civilization and the Ladies' Hum Journal. 4. Any one who is mulcted, robbed, murdered, butchered, betrayed, in the name of progress. ”

“ A person, either male or female, who instils into the head of another person, either voluntarily or for pay, the sum and substance of his or her ignorance. 2. One who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before. ”

“ A female who has rights, as distinguished from a married woman, who has duties. 2. One whose respect and love some married men may hold without the non-transferable license in the bottom of a trunk.
Martyrdom: The sweet apotheosis of the things we do not care to avoid.
Minute: 1. The crutch on which the Hour leans as it limps into Eternity. 2. A space of time in which we dream of something that will never come true, or form a resolution that another minute effaces. ”

“ The life of trade, and the death of the trader. ”

“ One who limits himself to his chosen mode of ignorance, and gets further into a bog than the man ahead of him. ”

“ A person who has grown so wise that the obvious escapes him. 2. One who reveres knowledge with superstitious awe, and whose worship of observation approaches the ecstatic. 3. One who believes that an atom is a monstrance that conceals the Holy Ghost of Force. ”

“ A man with more religion than he knows what to do with.
Philistine: A term of reproach used by prigs to designate certain people they do not like.
Philosopher: One who thinks in order to believe; one who formulates his prejudices and systematizes his ignorance. ”

“ A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and burdened with responsibilities from which only Death can file their fetters. ”

“ To remember one is a gentleman in spite of one's birth and training. 2. To give up your seat in a car to a woman, and tread on your neighbor's foot to get even. 3. To do a perfectly unselfish act from selfish motives.
Gent: A chauffeur who has a cab-driver for a chum.
Gentleman: One who is gentle toward the friendless. ”

“ A Battle Creek Bellifiller, made from selected fidoes, fuddies, fresh freddies, chibots and chitterlings. Ladies love it, babies cry for it, and men who eat it are loved by the ladies who love it who have babies who cry for it. ”

“ Emancipated Man: One who has dared to think for himself, and thus has added to his list of enemies.
Evolution: 1. A word that has reclassified in an entertaining manner our impermeable and eternal ignorance. 2. The growth of a thing from the simple to the complex, and the wasting away of the complex until it is simpler than ever. 3. The one superstition that is cordially hated by theologues.
Everybody: 1. The square root of zero. 2. The leavings of individuality. 3. An agglomeration of bipeds who subsist on one another's shanks. ”

“ The proof, record and final justification of the infallibility of Ignorance.
Strong Man: One who busies himself with the useful tasks that others can not, or will not do, and allows those who can do nothing else to do the easy things. ”

“ A poor man who eats too much, as contradistinguished from a gourmand, who is a rich man who "lives well." ”

“ A sewerage system that carries off everything, leaving the soul perfectly bald. 3. A condition of the mind that causes one to snoop around in garbage-dumps and start a league. 4. A plan of teaching things to children in which they are not interested. 5. An ethereal nose giving the miraculous power of sensing the lavatory in the Elysian Fields before it smells the flowers. (There is purity of mind, purity of body and purity of speech. Any one person endowed with all three of these modes or purity is blessed, elect, saved, or otherwise atrophied and pickled.) ”

“ The education of the public as to who you are, where you are, and what you have to offer in way of skill, talent or commodity. The only man who should not advertise is the man who has nothing to offer the world in way of commodity or service.
Abel: The first squealer.
Abhorrence: 1. A pronounced feeling of dislike in the presence of what is superior or unattainable. 2. To discover one's real self and to slander somebody or something else in revenge. 3. A form of hate that suffers from mal de mer. ”

“ The stupidity of one brain multiplied by twelve. ”

“ A person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed. ”

“ Socialist: 1. A person easily peeved. 2. In economics, a school of thought founded by Cain. 3. A man who, so far as he himself is concerned, considers a thing done when he has suggested it.
Smack: A crude, rude, vulgar and unsatisfactory substitute for a kiss.
Society: 1. An erotic clique that reads Vogue, Smart Set and Town Topics. 2. A congregation of people who are not persons. 3. A vast interchange of service through labor, ideas and commodities. 4. A relish for solitude.
Socialism: 1. A sincere, sentimental, beneficent theory, which has but one objection, and that is, it will not work. ”

“ Businessman: One who gets the business and completes the transaction—all the rest are clerks and laborers.
Butler: 1. A Person or Thing that has charge of the servants in a house belonging to another Person or Thing. 2. A tyrant without ears, eyes, organs, dimensions, passions.
Brain: A commodity as scarce as radium and more precious, used to fertilize ideas. [20]
Bohemia: A good place in which to camp, but a very poor place in which to settle down.
Bread: A foodstuff which the rich occasionally give to the poor as a substitute for cake. ”

“ A hideous juggernaut to whose wheels cling the blood and bone and the flattened flesh of a million dead emotions. 2. Not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature. 3. Obsolete psychology, or the arbitrary rule of a Theos or god. 4. An engine planned for the purpose of bewildering humanity. 5. Self-deceived egotism, hiding behind the name of Deity. 6. Antique and obsolete philosophy. 7. The science of a non-existent, all-powerful, all-wise and all-loving nix.
Thinker: 1. One who destroys philosophies. 2. One who can make others think. ”

“ That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea or absorb a new one.
Organized Religion: Antique philosophy, or the rule of the priest. [110]
Obstinacy: 1. To stick to your favorite lie or truth because you know you are wrong in either case. 2. The ego's peacock-plumes.
Optimist: 1. A neurotic person with gooseflesh, and teeth a-chatter, trying hard to be brave. 2. A man who when he falls in the soup thinks of himself as being in the swim. 3. A man who does not care what happens, so long as it doesn't happen to him. ”

“ Any man who is too cowardly to fight, and too fat to run. ”

“ The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but never does it himself. ”

“ A thing we give to others to keep for us. ”

“ The name every one gives his mistakes. ”

“ The arithmetic of the emotions. ”

“ A kind of heart stimulant—the digitalis of failure. ”

“ A thing that begins at home, and usually stays there. ”

“ A thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour. ”