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.
Beauty: The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Calamity: A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Destiny: A tyrant’s authority for crime and fool’s excuse for failure.
Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
Liberty: One of imagination’s most precious possessions.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
Misfortune: The kind of fortune that never misses.
Optimist: A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
Patience: A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
Reporter: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
Tariff: A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.
Telephone: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Truce: Friendship.
Ultimatum: In diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions.
War: A by-product of the arts of peace.
Year: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
