Humour
Excerpts from the Devil's Dictionary
ABORIGINIES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
CONGRESS, n. A body of men who meet to repeal laws.
CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
DEBT, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver.
DESTINY, n. A tyrant's authority for crime
DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
FORK, n. An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
HEATHEN, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.
LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.
MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills.
PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.
PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.
PRESIDENCY, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
RED-SKIN, n. A North American Indian, whose skin is not red -- at least not on the outside.
RIOT, n. A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.
SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.
SELFISH, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.
SENATE, n. A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
UN-AMERICAN, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.
VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
