Wit & Attitude Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Eloquence gets demoted from noble craft to con job in a single, surgical move. Bierce defines it not as clarity or truth, but as the ability to sell the obvious to people eager to be sold. The sting is in the redundancy: persuading “fools that white is the color that it appears to be” turns rhetoric into a hustle where the product is reality itself. If your audience needs convincing that white looks white, they’re not being educated; they’re being handled.

Then Bierce sharpens the blade. “It includes the gift of making any color appear white” is less about public speaking technique than about power: whoever controls the language controls the perception. Eloquence becomes a laundering mechanism, bleaching complexity, contradiction, even wrongdoing into something clean and acceptable. The line anticipates modern spin without needing to name it. When every color can be made to look white, it’s not persuasion anymore; it’s moral and factual repainting.

Context matters: Bierce is writing as a journalist forged in the corrosive aftermath of the Civil War and the Gilded Age, an era thick with boosterism, political stump speech, corporate mythmaking, and sanctimonious editorials. His Devil’s Dictionary persona treats civic language as an instrument of social hypnosis, especially in democracies where the crowd’s approval is currency. The subtext is bleak but bracing: eloquence isn’t dangerous because it’s ornate; it’s dangerous because it can make people feel certain while leaving them less able to see.