Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns a civic virtue into a character flaw with the casual cruelty of someone who spent a career watching ideals get pawned for access. His definition of "impartial" isn’t a compliment to fairness; it’s a diagnosis of blindness. In his world, people don’t take positions because evidence compels them, they take positions because there’s something in it: status, money, belonging, revenge. The truly "impartial" person, then, isn’t nobly balanced between arguments; they’re just too dim to spot the angle.

The joke works because it reverses the moral hierarchy. We’re trained to treat impartiality as a badge of integrity, especially in journalism and law, fields that sell legitimacy as a product. Bierce exposes the transaction underneath that sale. If everyone has incentives, then neutrality isn’t pure; it’s either a luxury (for those insulated from consequences) or a failure of imagination (for those who can’t see how power operates). His sting is aimed at the comforting myth that public debates are primarily about truth rather than leverage.

Context matters: Bierce wrote in the Gilded Age, when newspapers were openly partisan, industrialists bought influence like inventory, and reform rhetoric competed with machine politics. A journalist delivering this line is a professional self-indictment, too: the press loves to claim it stands above the fray, yet its survival depends on patrons, readership, and the social economy of outrage. Bierce’s "impartial" is less a saint than an incompetent opportunist - and that’s the most cynical part.