Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

“Broad-gauge” is the tell: Bierce isn’t merely insulting historians, he’s reclassifying them. The term comes from railroads, a technical boast about width, capacity, and reach. Applied to “gossip,” it turns the historian into a heavy industrial version of the village busybody: same appetite for story and scandal, just scaled up to nations, wars, and centuries. That’s Bierce’s signature move in The Devil’s Dictionary style - take a respectable vocation, swap its halo for a smirk, and let the reader notice how thin the difference can be.

The intent is less anti-intellectual than anti-pretension. Bierce had seen how “objective” narratives get assembled: by selection, omission, and the convenient smoothing of motives into plot. Calling history “gossip” needles the profession’s claim to neutrality; it suggests that what survives as fact often rides on the same impulses that drive rumor - status, grievance, the desire for a clean moral arc. The “broad-gauge” modifier also hints at institutional power: historians don’t just repeat talk, they lay tracks that future readers travel, making their choices feel inevitable.

Context matters. Bierce wrote in a post-Civil War America increasingly enamored with grand national stories, while journalism was professionalizing and mass-circulation papers were turning sensationalism into business. As a journalist and veteran, Bierce understood both the seductions of narrative and the violence buried under patriotic packaging. The line works because it’s funny in the way a good epithet is funny: it stings, then it forces a second look at the machinery behind “serious” knowledge.