Ambrose Bierce

That land full surely hastens to its
Where public sycophants in homage
The populace to flatter, and
The doubled echoes of its loud conceit

Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be— Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth, With a record of unreason seldome paralleled on earth
While I looked h...

Thou shalt no God but me adore: 'Twere too expensive to have more
No images nor idols make For Roger Ingersoll to break
Take not God's name in vain: select A time when it will have effect
Work not on Sabbath days at all, But go to s...

The flabby wine-skin of his
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored
The driblet of an aphorism

Father
whose hard and cruel law  Is part of thy compassion's plan,  Thy works presumptuously we
For what the prophets say they saw
Unbidden still the awful slope  Walling us in we climb to gain  Assurance of the shining

O Liberty,
God-gifted— Young and immortal maid— In your high hand uplifted, The torch declares your trade
Its crimson menace, flaming Upon the sea and shore, Is, trumpet-like, proclaiming That Law shall be no more
Austere incendiary...

I
AW—’t was in a dream, the other night—A man whose hair with age was thin and white;  One hundred years had bettered by his birth,
And still his step was firm, his eye was bright
Before him and about him pressed a crowd