Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce lands the knife with the casual precision of a man who’s watched respectable society perfect its alibis. Calling the corporation an “ingenious device” sounds, at first, like praise. The word carries the glow of American invention, the self-congratulating rhetoric of progress. Then he snaps the trap shut: the invention isn’t a new engine or a cure, but a legal architecture that turns moral agency into a rounding error.

The line works because it treats “responsibility” as the true cost of doing business, something that can be externalized as efficiently as waste. Bierce isn’t merely complaining about greed; he’s diagnosing a structural trick. “Profit” is framed as the clean, countable output. “Individual responsibility” is the messy residue, and the corporation’s brilliance is that it separates the two. The passive voice of the marketplace becomes a shield: decisions are made, harm happens, nobody did it.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Bierce wrote in the Gilded Age, when industrial titans and railroads consolidated power, courts expanded corporate personhood, and scandals made clear how distance from consequences could be monetized. As a journalist and satirist, he’s speaking to readers who recognize the new scale of enterprise and the old scale of accountability failing to keep up.

The subtext is a warning about modernity’s favorite bargain: efficiency in exchange for ethics. Bierce suggests the corporation isn’t just a business form; it’s a cultural technology for laundering guilt.