Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Friendless is not a confession here; it is a credential. Bierce strings together four blunt fragments that read like a police description of an undesirable citizen, then snaps the trap shut with the final clause: the real vice is "truth and common sense". The joke lands because the list mimics the moral accounting of respectable society - who you know, what you can hand out, what you own - before revealing that integrity is what actually gets you exiled.

The syntax does a lot of the work. No verbs until the last line, no cushioning, just clipped indictments. "Having no favors to bestow" turns social life into patronage; friendship becomes a transaction. "Destitute of fortune" makes economic failure sound like a moral stain. Bierce's cynicism isn't abstract; it is aimed at the civic machinery of reputation: newspapers, parties, clubs, and the back-scratching networks that decide who's heard and who's discarded.

Context matters. Bierce made his name in the post-Civil War Gilded Age, when corruption was less a scandal than an operating system and journalism was learning how easily it could be bought, bullied, or softened by access. The subtext is defensive and aggressive at once: if I'm isolated, it's because I refused the bribe economy. By framing truth-telling as an "addiction", Bierce also mocks the era's language of vice and respectability. He implies that society pathologizes honesty the way it polices drinking or profanity - not because it's harmful, but because it's inconvenient.