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A Cynic Looks at Life

Ambrose Bierce

84 ratings
A Cynic Looks at Life | Ambrose Bierce

A Cynic Looks at Life

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Civilization, Immortality, the Death Penalty, these are just a few of the essays enclosed in this collection, A Cynic Looks At Life. Written by Ambrose Bierce, these essays continue to be thought provoking, offering a valid outlook on life.
it a name by which it is known over half the world. One of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that any nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and adversity that will surely come to it. When a people would avert want and strife, or, having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment offers the only means—all other plans for safety or relief are as vain as dreams, as empty as the crooning of hags. And behold, here is it: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business is business"; you lazy workmen, railing at the capitalist by whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you starve—rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists, applauding with untidy palms when one of your coward kind hurls a bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable; you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to the labor problem" as there are among you those who can not coherently define it—do you really think yourselves wiser than Jesus of Nazareth? Do you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing with evils besetting nations and souls? Have you the effrontery to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes, your blacklisting, your boycott

Andy 08/31/2021
The witticisms just don't measure up to Bierce's other work. Here, his bitterness is completely unleavened by wisdom; time has not favored what could have been an observation of life.
Len 02/18/2020
There is wisdom in these pages. There is also nonsense. It is up to the reader to determine which is which.
Ruth 05/09/2014
Got loads of interesting facts! Makes me pause, reflect and mumble "dimmit! It's true!"
Bima 10/27/2012
makes you think about things you never think about, yes it's brilliant
Ivan 03/23/2012
I read this as part of Classic American Literature: 13 books by Bierce in a single file, improved 1/7/2011 [Kindle Edition]
todd 04/21/2009
Bierce was a tower on the intellectual landscape a hundred years ago, and this collection of essays suggests both why that was the case then and why he has little standing today. A quote like: "To fatten pigs, confine and feed them; to fatten rogues, cultivate a generous disposition," captures the e

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