A subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship . . . . [H]is master works for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with a look of tolerant recognition.
AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.
A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.
QUORUM, n. A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have their own way and their own way of having it. In the U.S. Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House.
KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a "crowned head," although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.
There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.
PLAGUE, n. In ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharaoh the Immune. The plague today . . . is merely Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.
ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.
Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man. The pig is taught by sermons and epistles / To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles.
K, n. A consonant; originally precisely that of our H, but altered to its present shape to commemorate the destruction of [one of two lofty columns in] the great temple of Jarute.
In theology, the state of a luckless mortal prenatally damned. The doctrine of reprobation was taught by Calvin, whose joy in it was somewhat marred by the sad sincerity of his conviction that although some are foredoomed to perdition, others are predestined to salvation.
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.
Youth looks forward, for nothing is behind! Age backward, for nothing is before.
OBSTINATE, adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the splendor and stress of our advocacy.
At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.
A cheap and easy cynicism rails at everything. The master of the art accomplishes the formidable task of discrimination.
Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.
Woman absent is woman dead.
The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain" - that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain" - that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him.
POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
Christians and camels receive their burdens kneeling.
WITCH, n. (1) Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.
Immigrant: An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.
MONUMENT, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated.
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