The Devil's Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce

Insurrection — an unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.

Dance — to leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with arms about your neighbor's wife or daughter. There are many kinds of dances, but all those requiring the participation of the two sexes have two characteristics in common: they are conspicuously innocent, and warmly loved by the vicious.

Day — a period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper — the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort. These two kinds of social activity overlap.

Pain — an uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another.

Clergyman — a man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.

Saint — a dead sinner revised and edited.
The Duchess of Orleans relates that the irreverent old calumniator, Marshal Villeroi, who in his youth had known St. Francis de Sales, said, on hearing him called saint: "I am delighted to hear that Monsieur de Sales is a saint. He was fond of saying indelicate things, and used to cheat at cards. In other respects he was a perfect gentleman, though a fool."

Liberty — one of Imagination's most precious possessions.

Wedding — a ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.

Russian — a person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul. A Tartar Emetic.

Respectability — the offspring of a liaison between a bald head and a bank account.

Reality — the dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.

Deluge — a notable first experiment in baptism which washed away the sins (and sinners) of the world.

Pilgrim — a traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted to sing psalms through his nose, followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience.

Pessimism — a philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.

Patriot — one to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.