Wit & Attitude Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce drags "history" off its marble pedestal and drops it into the gutter where he thinks it belongs: not a neutral record, but a curated story with bad incentives. The line works because it weaponizes repetition. Each "mostly" is a rhythmic shrug that turns certainty into suspicion. He is not arguing that nothing happened; he is arguing that what gets preserved, celebrated, and taught is biased toward the petty and the powerful, then sanded smooth into respectability.

The subtext is a journalist's contempt for official narratives. Bierce watched institutions manufacture heroism out of carnage and incompetence, and he built a career puncturing that kind of pomp. Calling rulers "mostly knaves" and soldiers "mostly fools" is less an insult than an accusation about systems: power selects for moral flexibility, war selects for obedience, and both rely on mythmaking after the fact. "Events, mostly unimportant" is the sharpest twist; it implies that history privileges the actions of elites even when those actions barely touch the deeper forces shaping ordinary life.

Context matters. Bierce is a Civil War veteran and a Gilded Age skeptic writing in a period of boosterism, empire-building, and newspaper sensationalism. He knew how easily publics can be led, and how quickly bloodshed can be narrated as destiny. The quote reads like a preemptive fact-check of the whole civic religion: distrust the record, distrust the authors, and especially distrust the people who benefit from being remembered as necessary.