Wit & Attitude Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Immortality, in Bierce's hands, isn’t a metaphysical promise; it’s a consumer product with a tantrum built in. Calling it a "toy" is the first cut: he shrinks the grandest human craving down to something shiny and childish, a thing we want because someone else has it, or because the wanting itself feels like proof we matter. The sing-song rhyme scheme only deepens the insult. It reads like a nursery rhyme, which is exactly the point: our most solemn spiritual posturing is, to Bierce, emotional infancy dressed up as doctrine.

The verbs do the real work. People "cry", "apply", then "dispute, contend and lie" - a neat escalation from neediness to bureaucracy to outright moral rot. Bierce isn’t arguing about whether immortality exists; he’s indicting what belief in it does to human behavior. The line "And if allowed" is a sly jab at gatekeeping: immortality becomes a privilege administered by institutions, the sort that thrive on applicants. Salvation as admissions office.

Then comes the wicked paradox: "Would be right proud / Eternally to die for". Bierce exposes the status economy inside piety. Even the promise of endless life gets repurposed into a chance to perform heroic self-sacrifice, to be seen as the kind of person who would "die for" the correct idea. As a late-19th-century journalist shaped by war, politics, and hypocrisy, Bierce aims his cynicism at the machinery of faith and ego alike: immortality isn’t the antidote to vanity; it’s vanity with an infinite timeline.