Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns prejudice into a petty grifter: not a conviction hammered out by experience, but a "vagrant opinion" loitering on the street corner of the mind, living off handouts. The phrase "without visible means of support" borrows the language of old vagrancy laws, where poverty itself was treated as suspicion. He flips that legalistic sneer onto the comfortable prejudices of polite society, implying they should be interrogated the way authorities once interrogated the poor. Its sting is double-edged: prejudice is both socially contagious and intellectually unemployable.

The intent is diagnostic, not conciliatory. Bierce isnt asking you to empathize with the prejudiced; hes stripping the posture of respectability from a bias that often masquerades as tradition, common sense, or moral certainty. "Visible" does crucial work: prejudice may have plenty of hidden supports - self-interest, fear, inherited status, a desire for belonging - but it cant produce evidence that would stand up in daylight. The line mocks the way prejudice insists it is simply noticing "how things are", while refusing the accountability we demand of other claims.

Context matters: Bierce wrote as a journalist and satirist in an America swollen with post-Civil War cynicism, rapid industrialization, and raw racial and class hierarchies. His Devil's Dictionary style weaponizes aphorism as a scalpel. By reducing prejudice to a vagrant, he makes it both ridiculous and indictable: an idle thought that still manages to do real, organized harm.