Science & Tech Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Litigation, in Bierce's hands, isn’t a noble forum for truth; it’s industrial meat processing with a legal letterhead. The gag works because it takes the courtroom’s self-mythology - impartial justice, due process, civilization - and swaps in the imagery of a slaughterhouse. You don’t enter as a citizen with rights. You enter as livestock: living, anxious, vaguely culpable. You exit as a sausage: repackaged, indistinguishable, and useful mainly to someone else.

Bierce’s specific intent is less to critique any one lawsuit than to mock the system’s claimed humanity. A machine doesn’t care about intentions; it cares about throughput. That’s the subtextual jab at how litigation grinds people down through procedure, fees, delays, and technicalities that feel designed to exhaust rather than resolve. The transformation from pig to sausage also hints at loss of identity: the litigant’s story becomes a set of filings, precedents, and billable hours. Even if you “win,” you’re processed.

Context matters: Bierce was a journalist and satirist writing in Gilded Age America, when corporate power, political corruption, and a rapidly professionalizing legal class made institutions feel less like guardians and more like engines. His cynicism isn’t abstract; it’s reportage sharpened into a sneer. The line lands because it refuses the comforting idea that law is a moral arena. It’s an apparatus - and the apparatus has an appetite.