When you doubt, abstain.

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

Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.

Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

Liberty: One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.

Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.

Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.

Alliance – in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Irreligion – the principal one of the great faiths of the world.

Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man’s choice, and is highly prized.

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

Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.

Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.

Perseverance – a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

Destiny: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.

Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills.

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

Dog – a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship.

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Experience – the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.

Prejudice – a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Doubt is the father of invention.

To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

A man is known by the company he organizes.

Impartial – unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Erudition – dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

An egotist is a person of low taste – more interested in himself than in me.

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth – two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.

Life – a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.

Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

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

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

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

Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

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.

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

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

Optimism – the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

Fidelity – a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.

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.

There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

Genealogy, n. An account of one’s descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

Edible, adj.: 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.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London.

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.

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

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

Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

Abscond – to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.

Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.

History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron – namely, that he is a blockhead.

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

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

Prescription: A physician’s guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers. What I said was that all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

Historian – a broad-gauge gossip.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is – it is her shadow.

Land: A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.

Alien – an American sovereign in his probationary state.

Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

Insurance – an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.

The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.

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

Sabbath – a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

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

Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.

Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.

Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

Wit – the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.

Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

Backbite. To speak of a man as you find him when he can’t find you.

Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.

Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Compromise, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.

Consul – in American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.

Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.

Egotism, n: Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.

Amnesty, n. The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

Genius – to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.

When you doubt, abstain.

Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.

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

Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.

Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.

We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.

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

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

Enthusiasm – a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

Confidante: One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.

Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

Forgetfulness – a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

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