Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns a supposedly neutral dictionary entry into a booby trap: a definition that exposes the hypocrisy it pretends to codify. On the surface, he mimics the period’s smug common sense - women are “objectionably” curious, men are the natural gatekeepers of knowledge. Then he flips the blade. The joke isn’t just that the stereotype is cruel; it’s that the men who repeat it are, themselves, ravenous with the very trait they condemn.

The syntax does a lot of the work. “Curiosity, n.” signals authority and finality, the tone of reference books and respectable opinion. Bierce uses that mask to smuggle in a sneer at how “respectable” language launders misogyny into fact. By calling male interest in female curiosity “one of the most active and insatiable passions,” he’s not praising masculine vigor; he’s describing a twitchy, compulsive need to monitor, test, and police women’s minds. The line reads like social control dressed up as moral judgment: if women want to know too much, they become dangerous; if men want to know whether women want to know too much, it becomes a virtue.

Context matters. Bierce wrote in a late-19th-century culture anxious about women’s education, suffrage, and shifting public roles. “Curiosity” is code for independence, for the refusal to accept one’s assigned ignorance. Bierce’s intent is classic satirist’s cruelty: he repeats the prejudice with such icy precision that it collapses under its own logic. The subtext: patriarchy isn’t calm confidence; it’s paranoia with better stationery.