the devil´s dictionary

alguns verbetes:

arrest: formally to detain one accused of unusualness.

bore: a person who talks when you wish him to listen.

cannon: an instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

congratulation: the civility of envy.

corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. hence the custom among the scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.

dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. this dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

future: that period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

logic: the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage.

marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

patience: a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

philosophy: a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

pray: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

religion: a daughter of hope and fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable.

vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

witch: 1. an ugly and repulsive old woman in a wicked league with the devil; 2. a beautiful and attractive young woman in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

:D

via.