Politics & Power Quote by Ambrose Bierce

War as dentistry: crude, intimate, and guaranteed to leave damage. Bierce’s definition turns “battle” from a noble clash of flags into a grotesque workaround for political failure. The image does the heavy lifting. A “political knot” suggests something man-made and solvable - a tangle of interests, pride, borders, succession. It “would not yield to the tongue,” meaning persuasion, diplomacy, the patient art of argument. So the teeth come out: a tool designed for tearing, not reasoning. The joke lands because it’s anatomically true. When talk breaks down, force doesn’t solve the underlying complexity; it rips through it.

The intent is classic Bierce: puncture euphemism. Governments sell war as honor, necessity, destiny. Bierce recasts it as a barbaric improvisation, the kind you attempt when you’ve exhausted subtler options or never valued them in the first place. The subtext is accusatory: battle is less “policy by other means” than policy by incompetence, vanity, or impatience - leaders reaching for violence because it’s decisive in the shallow way destruction is decisive.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Bierce fought in the American Civil War and spent decades watching the U.S. industrialize its politics and its killing. In The Devil’s Dictionary, he weaponizes the format of the tidy definition to expose the mess underneath. The line reads like a punchline, but it’s also an indictment of a civic culture that treats bloodshed as a problem-solving technique. If a nation’s tongue can’t untie the knot, Bierce implies, its teeth aren’t strength; they’re desperation.