A CYNIC LOOKS AT LIFE

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Ambrose Bierce. A CYNIC LOOKS AT LIFE

A CYNIC LOOKS AT LIFE

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Table of Contents

CIVILIZATION

I

II

III

THE GIFT O' GAB

NATURA BENIGNA

THE DEATH PENALTY

I

II

III

IV

V

IMMORTALITY

EMANCIPATED WOMAN

A MAD WORLD

EPIGRAMS OF A CYNIC

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Ambrose Bierce

THE GIFT O' GAB

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It is not only that we have had to "subdue the wilderness"; our educational conditions are adverse otherwise. Our political system is unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?

I do not hold that the political and social system that creates an aristocracy of leisure is the best possible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantages clearly enough. But I do hold that a system under which most important public trusts, political and professional, civil and military ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated men—that is, men of trained faculties and disciplined judgment—is not an altogether faulty system.

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