Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce isn’t defining absurdity so much as exposing how people weaponize the word. His mock dictionary entry turns a supposedly objective judgment into a confession of ego: “absurd” often means “I don’t like it,” dressed up as logic. The joke lands because it’s uncomfortably accurate. In everyday argument, calling something absurd isn’t a rebuttal; it’s a social move, a way to end discussion by implying the other person has stepped outside the bounds of sanity.

The phrasing is calibrated for maximum sting. “Manifestly inconsistent” sounds like courtroom certainty, a posture of rational authority. Then Bierce yanks the rug: inconsistent not with evidence, not with reality, but “with one’s own opinion.” The subtext is that we’re less attached to truth than to the feeling of being the sort of person who’s right. Absurdity becomes a mirror held up to the critic, reflecting their assumptions back at them.

Context matters. Bierce, a journalist shaped by the Civil War’s carnage and the Gilded Age’s hypocrisy, wrote The Devil’s Dictionary as an antidote to America’s self-flattering rhetoric. This line fits that project: it punctures moral certainty and intellectual vanity at once. It’s also a warning about discourse itself. When “absurd” is shorthand for “not mine,” argument collapses into tribal signaling. Bierce’s cynicism isn’t just comic; it’s diagnostic.