Enthusiasm – a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience. – Ambrose Bierce
Laughter — An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. – Ambrose Bierce
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. – Ambrose Bierce
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freemans power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country. – Ambrose Bierce
Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination. – Jean Baudrillard